Mariam Pare’ is a visual artist, designer, and speaker. Her paintings and other works have been exhibited locally, internationally, and are in numerous private collections. Her public painting demonstrations have become a visual metaphor to the core of her message—encouraging people toward superior levels of performance and inspiring ideas of innovation and creative thinking.

Her list of exhibition venues include the St. Petersburg Museum of Art, the Museum of Art Vancouver, the Orlando Museum of Art, First Canada Place, the New York City Children's Museum, the McCord Gallery, PerPopulus Gallery, and many others.

Mariam has appeared on the Katie Couric Show and with Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb on the Today Show. She met with Pierce Brosnan at his home in Malibu allowing her to personally deliver a painting she had done for him in his iconic James Bond role.

Mariam has also been interviewed on NPR and in the Huffington Post, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, MSN, and Reuters, just to name a few.

In 1996 Mariam was a victim of random gun violence that let her paralyzed, the bullet remains in her spine to this day. All of her paintings have been done by mouth painting. In fact, she was accepted in to the Mouth and Foot Painting Artists (MFPA) organization.

She uses her talks and art as an advocate to bring awareness to disability culture. She’s spoken about the issues of stigma, relationships, and independent living. She sees artists with disabilities that are inspirations—Chuck Close, Tommy Hollenstein, Frida Kahlo, and Eric Stegemann.

We discuss how making art about experiences help to process trauma and feelings. She has publicly addressed issues of mental health, depression, and suicide.

“Mariam has branched out to collaborate with other artists with disabilities to actively pursue disability advocacy through her art. She uses a combination of digital art, painting, video, and photography to generate a unique story from her own viewpoint, using her own life to reflect the overall challenges and ambitions of the larger disabled community. Her goal is to make images that embrace a sense of beauty while simultaneously affirms disability identity and awareness.”

Mariam is an inspiring person in many ways, and is a great role model for not only living life in full, but helping others to as well through beauty and creativity.