About The Artist

For over twenty years Jane Lillian Vance’s highly narrative and studiously   detailed paintings have been concerned with bridging the space between East and West.

Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, Vance attended the College of William and Mary, Exeter University in Devon, England, and Virginia Tech University. She is currently adjunct professor of The Creative Process through the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, as well as a public school aide for middle-school-aged children with special needs.

Vance is internationally known for creating paintings with brilliant detail, vivid iconography of Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, and the folk arts of the Subcontinent as well as the Appalachian Blue Ridge Mountains. Her paintings are housed in private collections and museums on four continents. Widely recognized for her knowledge and understanding of Tibetan and Nepali culture, Jane is a frequent lecturer and keynote speaker on the subject.

For many years, with little public notice, Vance worked constantly on her elaborate, increasingly Tibetan-focused oil paintings, until internationally acclaimed art critic Suzi Gablik visited Vance and began their great friendship, writing about Vance in Satish Kumar’s Resurgence magazine, and in Images of Earth and Spirit, an English anthology of spiritual contemporary art.

In 1999, Vance met teacher Jenna Swann and began a travel partnership and project collaboration, resulting in their award-winning documentary, Into Nepal, and in countless presentations together about their travels. In the winter of 2000, accompanied by their friend Amchi Tsampa Ngawang Lama, Vance and Swann crossed an 18,000-foot Himalayan pass in a snowstorm during a month-long trek in Nepal’s Annapurna region. It was during this trek that Tsampa, Swann, and Vance planned the Buddhist lama’s first visit to America, where he would later live for 6 months at Vance’s home studying and teaching together in Blacksburg, Virginia. During these months the Buddhist lama agreed to have Jane create the Amchi portrait. The friendship between Vance, Swann and Tsampa would soon include film producer, Tom Landon and journey of this painting would become the internationally acclaimed and award winning documentary: A Gift for the Village.

The festival for A Gift for the Village drew national and international attention, with Nepal’s television and newspapers interviewing and airing segments on Vance and her long-standing appreciation of Nepal and its people. The King of Lo personally thanked Vance for the gift of the painting, which Amchi Tsampa described to the King as “the jewel of Mustang.”

Vance adores her two children, daughter, Iris Lillian Vance and son, Emerson Arthur Siegle. When they were young, she spent a year in New Delhi, India, and another year in Kandy, Sri Lanka, home-schooling her children and researching South Asian art. The Gift for The Village journey was Vance’s eighth trip to South Asia, which she first visited in 1985. Vance lives with her many rescued cats, thousands of flower bulbs, and glorious garden beds on three acres along a roller coaster rural road in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.