Linda Mead was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Northern Virginia during a time of quickly expanding suburban sprawl. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University with a concentration in metals and textiles. She relocated to Germany where she lived for 11 years before moving to New Jersey in 2002. In 2007 she began etching at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey with Vijay Kumar.

Her experience in Germany deepened a long-standing interest in the relationship between the places one finds oneself and one’s relationship to those places, especially in a country where rural and urban, nature and industry are physically and emotionally hard to separate. Elements of nature figure prominently in her work influenced, in part, by hours spent wandering around the woods and creek behind her childhood home.

Originally, Mead’s areas of concentration were jewelry and textile design. After spending many years as a painter, she returned to working with metal, embedding images in copper plates and working primarily as a printmaker. She has begun to use etched copper plates as sculptural elements. Her current work reflects a sense of unease triggered by the precarious state of the world and the consequences of human behavior.