Joanna Jones was born in Shrewsbury, England.

Jones’ artistic career began with her first venture in 1966 when she founded ZEEZ Arts with Peter Kennard. The following year she was awarded the Ernest Jackson Scholarship and in 1969 was the recipient of three major prizes, namely the British Institute Award, the Richard Jack Prize and first prizewinner of the GLAA Painting Competition. The following year she graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in London.

Over the next 10 years she collaborated with Carlyle Reedy in film and performance art, and together they founded K’Un Films. The year 1983 marked a turning point in her career with Jones returning to the canvas and producing her first works using the body as a painting instrument. Since then she has continued to experiment with the body as a painting tool, exhibiting regularly in solo and group shows throughout Europe.

Notable among Jones’ recent work (and in collaboration with Laura Padgett) is her contribution to Vera Frenkels’ Bodymissing in 1995. The following year she worked with photographer Ute Schendel for her solo exhibition entitled, Joanna Jones in the Charite. In 1998, she once again joined forces with Padgett to produce a video, for the Newalk Museum, Leicester named, What she could Paint. In August 2000 she gave a presentation – The Medium is not the Message – at the University of Bremen as part of the IFU Body Programme. That same year she was honoured with the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral Fellowship.

Alice M. Mansell, Academic President of the Technical University of British Columbia defines Jones’ work as “so intent that one immediately goes beyond the visual, the pleasure of the eye, to a deeper, more physical engagement with those traces of image choreography.”