JD Slack was an Isle Royale Artist-in-Residence from August 5th to August 23rd, 2003. She is a Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies at Michigan Tech.
She is an accomplished pastel artist. Her pastel technique is uniquely more like painting than drawing and she typically works in many layers of intense colors to create images that occupy the boundary between the representational and the abstract. She has exhibited her work in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and sells her work at several galleries.
JD and her partner, Kenny Svenson, live on a farm in the Copper Country in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Record snowfall is 400 inches (that is not a typo) for one winter and the growing season is very short.