Francesca Holland
Francesca Holland
Francesca Holland is a New England-based environmental design engineer, artist and scientific illustrator who has been running her own art business since 2014. She believes that creativity is a central tool for educating and uniting people toward common values and building vision for a better world.
Francesca has achieved a Master of Arts in Design Engineering with a focus on environmental systems from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) as well as a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Studio Art from the University of Connecticut (UConn). An art student abroad, she also studied art at the International Studies Institute in Florence, Italy. With a history working in the materials, marine structures, and composting fields, Francesca has about a decade of multidisciplinary experience as a systems engineer, environmental activist/researcher, and artist. She currently works in Stewardship at the Connecticut branch of the National Estuarine Research Reserve (CTNERR).
Her passion for art started in early childhood, growing up inspired by the many creatives in her family including painters, poets, dancers, musicians, cooks and DJs. Her artwork often focuses the human figure and nature. Many of her pieces are introspective, portraying emotional states of mind on the canvas in a surrealist style. She is passionate about incorporating symbols of female empowerment into her pieces. Some of her portraits also pay tribute to influential music and sports legends.
She has experience in a variety of different mediums including oil and acrylic paints, relief and intaglio printmaking, ink, oil pastel, charcoal, graphite, marker, colored pencils and digital art.
She sells prints of her work and takes commission requests.
Francesca’s artwork has been selected for exhibition at various venues across southern New England including the RISD Museum in 2025, Brown University's juried Annual Student Exhibition in 2025, the Annual Mystic Outdoor Art Festival in 2018, a UConn Funds the Arts Charity Event in 2017 and the UConn Wilbur Cross Building in 2016. Her artwork won 1st and 3rd place prizes in the 2016 Bethlehem Fair juried art exhibition. She has partnered with various small businesses around Connecticut and Rhode Island to show and sell her work over the years.
She has worked as a scientific illustrator for seven different UConn research labs, for which a selection of her work has been published. This includes being a scientific illustrator for the Lawrence Hightower Collection of Ethnographic, Ethnohistorical and Ancient Footwear collection which is now a part of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.
Francesca was awarded RISD's Graduate Commons Grant following her project in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab creating a Field Guide of organizing principles supporting researchers aiming to help build equitable, community-driven ecosystem restoration efforts. She is continuing this work volunteering as a PADI Advanced Open Water SCUBA Diver with Remote Ecologist supporting coral reef restoration in Colombia.
Francesca aspires to shape her career to combine her technical background with her artistic thinking in order solve important problems relating to the environment, public health and social justice.
