Jocelyne Prince grew up in St. Boniface, Manitoba, a francophone community where Louis Riel, a Métis leader central to Franco-Manitoban history, was often a topic of daily conversations with her father. This focus on a complicated and polarizing figure, vilified by many and celebrated by others, was formative. Equally immersive was the prairie landscape; here a natural minimalism trained her eye to look for shifts in light, color, or movement within the vastness of the flat fields. This landscape and the textured life of Riel nurtured a sensitivity to subtlety and nuance that are ever present in her teaching and studio practice.

Prince went on to study painting, then lived in Montreal where she hoped to hide out as long as possible, but a new glass school foiled her reclusive plans. She was quick to embrace glass, a malleable transparent material that glows while in process and then cools into invisibility was too perfect. Since that moment she has been collaborating with glass, observing its astonishing and seemingly limitless potential.

Prince is a full professor in the Glass Department at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Notable fellowships and awards include a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship and RISD’s Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching.