Born “Veronica Grigorashvily” in 1976 in Safonovo, Russia, Veronica Winters grew up in a remote suburb of Moscow. While she always felt herself to be an artist, the sociopolitical climate of the USSR and, after the fall of the Union, Russia, forced Winters to pursue a more practical career. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering, an endeavor that allowed her to study abroad on scholarship at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.

Winters married Max Fomitchev at the young at of nineteen and while he was able to immigrate to the United States in 1996, she was unable to join him until almost a year later. After their reunion in 1997, Winters’ passion for the arts was reawakened. She began taking courses at the Tulsa Community College and eventually earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2003 from Oklahoma State University. Two years later, she completed her MFA in painting, which she studied at Pennsylvania State University with such artistic luminaries as Robert Yarber and John Bowman. This was the same year, 2005, that she changed her surname to “Winters” as she forayed into the world as a professional artist.

Winters has always been well-received; her work, often inspired by her travels and her photography, is primarily created with colored pencil using incredible detail and rich, saturated colors that have the effects of paint. She is so respected in the art community that she now teaches at the Art Alliance of Central Pennsylvania and at the Galaxy, an art-in- education programme, in addition to offering private lessons in her own studio. Winters has also published an instructional book in 2008, “Painting in Colored Pencil: Basic Realistic Techniques for Beginners” and a catalogue of her work, “Life in Colored Pencil.” She continues to receive numerous awards and her work has been published in a number of art magazines, while her art is commissioned for and collected in private collections both in the United States and Europe.