Luana Coonen

Luana was born and raised in Hawaii by her mother - a full-time artist with a degree in botany. Within a rainforest backyard playground, her childhood was rich with creativity, in a theme of green. When moving to the San Francisco Bay Area to earn her BFA in jewelry/metalsmithing from California College of the Arts, she quickly noticed the dramatic contrast of a densely populated city to the lush, unhurried, pace of tropical Hawaii. She expresses her deep abiding love of nature's tiniest wonders through her artwork, finding ways within her work as a jeweler to amplify the beauty of simple natural objects and bring attention to our emotions. This is reinforced by her passion to use found objects, renewable materials, and recycled metals. Luana currently enjoys teaching, traveling internationally, creating one of a kind works for exhibition, and managing her jewelry studio in Sebastopol, California.