Francesca Holland

Francesca Holland is a design engineer, artist and scientific illustrator studying for her Master’s Degree at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island.  

After finishing graduate school in May 2025, 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.

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 received her Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering and her Studio Art Minor from the University of Connecticut (UConn) in 2019.  In 2017 she studied art abroad at the International Studies Institute in Florence, Italy.  

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Francesca’s artwork has been selected for exhibition at various venues across Connecticut including Brown University's 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.

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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.