Joanne Horvath Staley has been an award winning, multi-dimensional artist for over four decades. A first generation Hungarian-American, she counts a stone-carver, a custom milliner, two painters and a violin maker in her immediate blood line. Her personal artistry is in painting, silversmithing and fiber art. A trained artist and certified art teacher, she has captured prizes from juried art competitions in the South and purchase awards from national corporations.

Her three dimensional work with metal was likely the stone-carver genes bubbling up to the surface. Sterling, copper and brass are her raw materials and she wields a full arsenal of tools, techniques, and explosive gases in the sculptural process of forming beautifully wearable objects from flat sheets of shapeless metal and spools of inert wire. Many of her pieces are further enhanced with natural minerals or semi precious stones. There is something fundamentally organic in most of her jewelry creations: individuals who buy her work know they are wearing (or have gifted) a unique piece of jewelry.

Alongside her metal work, Joanne has been creating fiber art for over sixty years, moving fluently between knitting, crochet, felting, weaving, batik, tie-dye, basket making, and mixed-media work with paper and natural fibers. Many pieces are freeform abstractions; others retell Biblical narratives, often using Alabama fibers she hand-dyes with plants gathered from the region.

Her favorite works are the ones that tell a story or carry a moral lesson — colorful, three-dimensional, intricately detailed, and mixed with clay, pine needles, metal, wool, cotton, and synthetics. Her off-loom woven pieces have been exhibited at Columbia Seminary in Atlanta, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, Troy University, Auburn University, and galleries and churches across Alabama.

Joanne was an Assistant Professor at Troy State University for seventeen years and has taught in AUM's continuing education program for many more. Her teaching extends to children of all ages as Alabama's “Artist in Residence” for The Alabama State Council for the Arts and the Montgomery Arts Council. In the fall of 2023, Alfred University in New York invited her to lead a fiber workshop — a testament to the reach and originality of six decades of work.