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Terry Ellen Sand
USA
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"My comedic core infuses everything I make, in every medium."
Terry Sand is a San Francisco artist whose path to visual art runs through a remarkably full life in performance, encompassing modern dance choreography, television, improv comedy, teaching, and motivational speaking. She has performed across the United States since the early eighties, building a career defined by spontaneity, presence, and connection with an audience. That performance background is not a separate chapter set apart from her visual work but the very ground it grows from, and understanding Terry's art means recognizing that the instincts of a choreographer and an improviser, the timing, the play, the willingness to follow a moment wherever it leads, now express themselves on paper, canvas, and in three dimensions.
Over Time | Acrylic
$2,500
24 X 20
"Over Time" expresses the insane lack of our own personal time. The dancer is literally bent over backwards in search of "work/life balance."
Her years in performance took many forms, each feeding the sensibility that now shapes her art. Terry's work has included improv comedy shows, keynote speeches, and seminars on Improv Team Building and Humor and Healing, the latter pair revealing a conviction that runs throughout everything she does, that play and laughter are not frivolous but restorative. She is a lifetime member of Playfair and HumorTech, and a founding member of Femprov, the first all-female improv troupe in San Francisco, a distinction that speaks to her role not only as a performer but as someone who built space for others. These commitments to comedy and to community now surface in the spirit of her visual work.
Blue Bubble Ladies | Acrylic
$2,000
20 X 16
Waterfall and goldfish therapy prove effective in reviving melancholy coworkers.
"I drew my choreographies first, then brought them to the stage."
Terry also carries numerous television and film credits, and as a former member of the Screen Actors Guild and the American film and television unions, she spent years inside the professional world of the screen. Among the more colorful distinctions of her life, she was crowned the first Miss Haight-Ashbury, a historic San Francisco title she wears with characteristic good humor. This blend of the genuine and the lighthearted, of real accomplishment held with a wink, is precisely the sensibility that animates her art, where seriousness of craft and a refusal to take herself too seriously coexist without tension.
Four Roommates and An Apple | Acrylic
$2,500
20 X 16
Four roommates hide in the dark from the landlord. They decide no one the should crunch apple until he's gone.
Her transition to working as a full-time artist began during the Covid shutdown, a period that, for Terry, opened rather than closed a door. She has practiced art her entire life, and the pause in performance allowed her to turn fully toward something that had always been present, devoting herself to it completely for the first time. There is a quiet significance in this, the sense of a lifelong undercurrent finally becoming the main channel, and Terry approaches it not as a late beginning but as a long-anticipated arrival, delighting in the chance to give her visual practice the full attention it had always deserved.
A summer hat in full bloom requires brighter lips.
Lipstick Lady | Acrylic
$2,000
18 X 14
"I move between pen and ink, watercolor, wire, charcoal, and ceramics because each material lets my characters live somewhere new, in situations I love imagining."
"I have practiced art my entire life, even through all the years of dance, television, and comedy, so becoming a full-time artist did not feel like starting over. It felt like finally giving my whole attention to something that was always there. My characters appear in imaginative locations and situations, and my comedic instinct runs through all of it, the same instinct that guided me through improv and choreography. Chagall, Matisse, Moore, Picasso, and Calder showed me that imagination can be serious work and that play belongs in art. Now I am ready to introduce what I have been making my whole life to a much broader audience."
Fish Fly | Acrylic
$1,500
18 X 14
Fish travel lowers toxic emissions.
Her chosen media are deliberately varied, reflecting a restless and exploratory creativity. She works in pen and ink, watercolor, acrylics, wire, charcoal, and ceramics, moving fluidly between the flat and the sculptural, the precise and the gestural. This range is not indecision but appetite, a desire to discover what each material can do and how each might carry her ideas differently. Across all of them runs a single unifying thread, her comedic core, which infuses everything she makes. Her characters appear in imaginative locations and situations, populating worlds that reward a second look and a smile, so that humor becomes not a surface decoration but the organizing intelligence of the work.
Two-can Meditate | Acrylic
$1,500
18 X 14
Tropical Zen retreat encourages meditation with local birds.
Terry's visual vocabulary draws on a distinguished lineage of modern masters whose influence she carries openly. She is greatly influenced by the work of Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, and Alexander Calder, an assembly that tells its own story about her sensibility. From Chagall's dreamlike floating worlds to Matisse's joyful color, from Moore's and Calder's sculptural play with form and balance to Picasso's restless reinvention, these are artists who treated imagination as a serious tool and movement as something that could live in a static image. Terry's work sits comfortably within this company, inheriting its blend of whimsy, formal daring, and emotional warmth.
Global warming rain drain.
Not Enough | Acrylic
$1,000
18 X 14
Her relationship with art began long before any career decision, rooted in a childhood steeped in creativity. Terry grew up in Los Angeles in a family that deeply appreciated the arts, where her parents invested in artists both famous and emerging, art books filled the shelves, art supplies abounded, and the kitchen table served as a center of constant creative projects. This was an upbringing in which making things was simply part of daily life, and the easy familiarity with materials and ideas that Terry shows today can be traced directly to that household, where art was not an occasion but an atmosphere, present and encouraged at every turn.
"Art filled my childhood home long before it filled my career."
Her formal training, intriguingly, came through movement rather than the visual arts. Terry earned both her Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in Modern Dance from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the way she worked as a choreographer reveals how naturally the visual and the kinetic intertwine for her. She drew and painted her choreographies first, then transformed those drawings into on-stage performances, treating the page as the place where movement was born before it ever reached a body or a stage. This practice of beginning in image and translating into motion suggests that, for Terry, drawing and dancing were never truly separate disciplines but two phases of a single creative act.
Uptown Apple | Watercolor
$800
16 X 12
Busy skyline reflects Post Covid Reprieve.
Throughout her life Terry has drawn and painted continuously, regardless of where her professional focus lay, and that lifelong consistency lends her current work a depth that belies the recency of her full-time commitment. Now she is focused on introducing her art to a broader audience, stepping forward to share something she has cultivated privately for decades. There is confidence in this move, the assurance of an artist who has been quietly developing her hand across a lifetime and is now ready to let the work speak publicly, on its own terms, to viewers who may not yet know the range of what she has been making all along.
Masked merriment goes viral.
Masquerade Run Amuck | Watercolor
$800
16 X 12
Her work has been featured in a variety of curated shows and galleries, marking her growing public presence. These have included the Moldaw Gallery in Palo Alto, the Equestrian Art Festival in Portola Valley, Art Bias Gallery in Redwood City, the bi-annual Silicon Valley Art Show, and the Silicon Valley Featured Artist Show in Los Altos, alongside the Redwood City Library local artist recognition show, the J. Stevens Gallery in Redwood City, the San Francisco Women's Art Gallery, a fundraising SPCA silent auction art show in Manhattan, Kansas, and Art Now Media Gallery in New York. Across these venues, Terry continues to do what she has done her whole life on stage and now does on the page and in clay, inviting an audience in, making them look closely, and leaving them with a sense of delight.
Backstage Warm-up | Mixed Media
$1,000
16 X 20
Performers warm up to audition for "Circus Oy Vey."
"The shutdown finally let me become a full-time artist at last."
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