Joan Sherman was born and raised in New York City. Drawing was always a language she shared with her mother, who was a fashion designer. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and started working in bronze — creating sculptures relating to dance and music, which were shown in galleries from New York to Italy to Evansville, Indiana. New methods of casting directly from organic form caught her imagination and she began to create one-off art furniture and light fixtures in bronze.

More recently, she returned to her love of drawing. Spending most of her time in rural Connecticut, she began to draw the flowers she grew in ways that were both realistically rendered and dreamlike. She also began to reflect upon objects that we touch every day not only as a means of storytelling but also as a means of reflecting the societal and generational changes that they reveal.