Zia Foley is a Toronto based visual artist, free-lance illustrator and art teacher. Before working as an artist, Zia studied history and international relations, and lived and worked abroad teaching English. While living in and travelling through the Middle East and Asia she photographed the patterns she found in traditional art, architecture, handcraft, and nature. In her work today, she draws on this exposure to a variety of cultures, by using traditional media to experiment with line, colour and form, and to explore the boundaries between representation and abstraction.