Anna Chan

Artist Bio

Anna Chan is a mixed media artist based in Bay Shore, New York, best known for her sculptural wildlife portraits created from sand and seashells. Her work transforms overlooked fragments of the shoreline into luminous mosaics that speak to beauty, fragility, and interconnectedness.

Chan studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she graduated with honors with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. She went on to work as a jewelry designer for Tiffany & Co., developing a precision and sensitivity to materials that continues to inform her practice today.

Her seashell sculptures emerged in 2020 at Robert Moses Beach on Long Island, where long walks with her daughter during the global pandemic sparked a new artistic language. What began as arranging shells in the sand quickly evolved into a dedicated body of work, blending her design background with her passion for the ocean and its endangered inhabitants.

Chan has collaborated with Amazon Prime Video, Hendrick’s Gin, and Stanford University, and her work has been featured in international publications and media. Her exhibitions include solo and group shows at cultural centers, galleries, and museums across the United States, among them the Annmarie Sculpture Garden in Maryland and the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition in New York. Most recently, her exhibition Faces in the Sand opened at the Tribby Arts Center in Fort Myers, Florida (August–October 2025), curated by Marge Lee in collaboration with photographer Grace Berge.

Alongside her studio practice, Chan is dedicated to community engagement through her sand and seashell art workshops. Hosted at libraries, museums, and community centers across Long Island and beyond, these programs — often waitlisted — allow participants of all ages to experience the meditative joy of creating with her proprietary self-hardening sand and seashells.

At the heart of her practice lies a dedication to transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. By elevating humble shells into radiant portraits, Chan invites audiences to rediscover the treasures of the shoreline while reflecting on the fragile balance of the natural world.

Anna Chan lives and works in Bay Shore, NY

Artist Website

Artist Statement

I create wildlife portraits from sand and seashells, transforming the fragments of the shoreline into intricate reliefs that are both jewel-like and ephemeral. My work is a meditation on fragility, resilience, and our relationship with the natural world.

This practice began in 2020 at Robert Moses Beach on Long Island. During the pandemic, I spent long walks with my daughter collecting shells and arranging them in the sand. What started as play became a new visual language: the shells became my brushstrokes and gemstones, and the sand, my canvas. That moment of discovery continues to define my work today.

My background as a jewelry designer deeply informs this process. I studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with honors in Fine Arts, and later worked at Tiffany & Co., where I developed a sensitivity to scale, form, and precision. In my current work, I approach each shell as I once approached a gemstone — recognizing its singularity and allowing it to dictate the rhythms of the portrait.

The creatures I sculpt — lions, elephants, eagles, sea turtles, crocodiles, and others — embody both majesty and vulnerability. By assembling shells into their likenesses, I aim to honor their beauty while reminding viewers of the precariousness of their survival in a changing climate. Seashells themselves are symbolic: remnants of life once lived, resilient yet fragile. In reimagining them as portraits of endangered wildlife, I hope to spark reflection on the balance between wonder and loss.

My process moves between the ephemeral and the permanent. Some sculptures are created directly on the beach, surrendered to the tide, while others are preserved as lasting relief works exhibited in galleries and collections. Whether temporary or enduring, each piece carries the same tension — the fleeting and the eternal, the ordinary and the extraordinary.

Through this work, I invite viewers to rediscover the shoreline not as debris, but as treasure — to see in each shell a story, a jewel, and a memory of the sea. My art is both a celebration of nature’s beauty and a quiet call to care for it.