Heather Rios is a mixed-media artist whose work celebrates the beauty of life's happier moments.

Her passion to create stems from her atypical and often chaotic past. Her childhood home was a small pink farmhouse in rural Appalachia that lacked electricity and running water. She grew to treasure the simple things that we often take for granted-- a shiny pebble, a colorful button, a rare piece of candy.

She has survived childhood abuse, domestic abuse, assault, the loss of her first child, moving 21 different times and a myriad of other traumas to reach a moment when she decided to make art to cheer up herself (and others)! And she now refuses to turn back. No matter how dark and depressing the world gets, she continues to make the most colorful, sweet, happy and joyful art she can imagine.

Rios often intermingles techniques learned from her academic art school studies with folk art practices she learned from her Grandmother as a child. Her art often blurs the lines between fine art and craft, pop art and political art, realism and fantasy.

Her work has been exhibited in fine arts galleries from NYC to LA, and also such unique settings as Ripley's Believe It or Not, Food Network's "Super Mega Cakes" TV series, and The International Museum of Dinnerware Design. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, multiple magazines and publications and is also in the permanent collection of the Art Museum of WVU.

She currently lives in Morgantown, West Virginia with her three amazing children, her partner Tom, and two cats.