Born in Washington, D.C., in 1952, Shelley Laffal began her art training in 1971 at the Maryland Art Institute in Baltimore. Traveling to Sasketchewan, Canada, she studied with Canadian artist Ernest Lindner at The Emma Lake Art Community and at the California Institute of The Arts (Cal Arts), in Valencia, California.
After years of roaming the back streets of Santa Fe and Key West, and living in Costa Rica, Laffal found the moody colors and emotional intensity of Latin culture infusing her work - an influence that's still evident today.
Returning home to the nation's capital, where she spent a decade creating a series of garment-like sculptures whose intricately painted surfaces and dramatic female forms became her trademark. But in recent years her need to tell a more intimate and less abstract story inspired her to explore figurative painting.
Her most recent body of work, a series called Portrait Fiction, infuses contemporay portraiture with storytelling, creating a quirky and provocative new genre of portraiture.

SELECTED GROUP AND SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1979 4 Woman Artists; Woman's Center, Sarasota, Fl, Florida Fine Arts Council
1980 Emerging Female Voice, Thomas Center Gallery, University Florida Gainsville, Florida
1981 Group Show II , Woman's Center, Sarasota, Florida, Sponsored by Florida Fine Arts Council
1982 Tampa Bay '82, Tampa Museum, Tampa, Florida
1983 Hot Laps; Solo Show, Joan Hodgell Gallery, Sarasota, Florida
1989 Debut Solo Show, Zenith Gallery, Washington D.C.,
1990 Off The Wall, Quadrangle Developement Corp., Washington D.C., International Sculpture '90, Montgomery College, Rockville, Maryland
1991 Art About Function, Washington Square, Washington, D.C., Secret Lives, Solo Show, Zenith Gallery, Washington, DC
1992 Personal adornment, Textile Arts Centre, Chicago,IL
1993 Decorators' Show House, for Bloomingdales, Washington, D.C.,
1994 Indigo Galleries, Boca Raton, Florida., Art Across The Borders, The Art Museum Of The Americas, Washington, D.C., Solo Intro Show, Zenith Gallery, Washington, D.C.
1995 Figurative Show Waxlander Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
1996 Gallery Artists, Zenith Gallery, Washington, DC
1998 Treeman- Human, 20th Anniversary Show, Zenith Gallery, Wash., D.C.
1999 Washington Square, Wash., D.C.
2000 Tyson II Corporate Headquarters, McLean, VA., Touchstone Gallery
2000 All Media Juried Show, Washington, D.C.
2002 Angels and Messengers, The Dennis & Phillip Ratner Museum, Bethesda, MD

Laffal's work resides in numerous private and corporate collections throughtout the country.