Patricia Leidl is a visual artist and writer based on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. She spent decades in mainstream media as a graphic artist, illustrator, and journalist before transitioning to communications work with the United Nations and USAID, with postings in New York, Geneva, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Her 2015 book, The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy, earned a Prose Prize and a Kirkus Starred Review.
A serious illness in 2021 brought her peripatetic career to a halt and drew her back to her earliest passion: visual art. „It is as if the universe has dragged me kicking and screaming back into what I was meant to do,“ she reflects. Years spent witnessing human suffering have deepened her conviction that humor and beauty serve as vital counterweights to a world that is, as she puts it, „stunningly lovely, but chronically disordered.“
Her work draws on a rich visual vocabulary — religious iconography, medieval symbolism, angels, demons, familiars, and the natural world — rendered in a style that is distinctly her own: puckish, dark, and slightly delirious.
Leidl holds a Diploma in Journalism, a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and a Master of Graduate Liberal Studies from Simon Fraser University.