Michael Shane Neal

Michael Shane Neal has completed more than 600 commissioned portraits displayed in institutions around the world — including the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, where his painting of Congressman John Lewis was acquired in 2020.

His sitters read like a roll call of American life: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, President George H.W. Bush, Majority Leaders Robert C. Byrd and Bill Frist, actors Morgan Freeman and Jimmy Fallon, and more than a dozen Federal Judges. He was a protégé of Everett Raymond Kinstler, and today paints from Kinstler's former studio inside the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park — a room previously occupied by Frank Vincent DuMond, who taught Georgia O'Keeffe and Norman Rockwell. Neal is only the third artist to occupy the space in more than a century.

He is chairman of the board of the Portrait Society of America and a recipient of its Grand Prize Award, along with the Lotos Award of Distinction for the Arts. For over thirty years he has taught workshops around the world — and for the first time, that training is coming to Drawing America.