Shanna Compton

About the Artist

Shanna Compton is an artist and poet in Blue Hill, ME, working in painting, various printmaking techniques, collage, and mixed media. Since relocating to midcoast Maine in 2021, she has cultivated a more immersive personal studio practice, finding new inspiration and subjects in Maine’s raw natural beauty, deep woods, and wild spaces, while deepening her explorations into recurrent personal and political themes. She has studied printmaking at the Center for Book Arts in New York (letterpress), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle (relief), and elsewhere. She has an MFA from the New School, NYC.

Shanna is also the author of five books of poems, most recently Creature Sounds Fade, published by Black Lawrence Press. She has worked with dozens of independent publishers as a designer, cover artist, lettering artist, and illustrator, and creates handmade books with linocut covers for her own small press, Bloof Books. Since 2016, she has been the in-house designer for Black Square Editions, directed by the poet and art critic John Yau.

Her new book, Deep Whoosh, is an artist book of 50 collages, published in summer 2025. Collages from the book were the subject of a solo exhibition at Anodyne in Searsport in June 2025.