Jenny May
About Jenny
Jenny May is a Houston-based artist, educator, and former practicing attorney whose life has been shaped by movement, music, creativity, and reinvention.
Born in Huntsville, Alabama, Jenny began figure skating at four years old. As a young adolescent, she left home to train in Delaware as a nationally competitive figure skater. On the ice, she discovered the expressive possibilities created when disciplined technique, music, and movement come together—an experience that continues to influence her visual art.
After an injury ended her skating career, Jenny attended Vanderbilt University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science and studied art history. She later moved to New York City, earned a master’s degree in education, and taught mathematics in a New York City public school. She subsequently earned her Juris Doctor and practiced corporate and securities law with DLA Piper in New York.
Jenny moved to Houston in 2013 and later returned to legal practice with DLA Piper and Rottenstreich Farley Bronstein Fisher Potter Hodas. She has since returned to her first professional love—education—and now teaches third-grade science and social studies at a private school in Houston.
Throughout these chapters, art has remained a constant: a place where movement becomes line, music becomes rhythm, and memory becomes color. Jenny lives in Houston with her two children, and her work is held in private collections in Alabama, New York, and Texas.
Artist Statement
My work is deeply influenced by music and movement. Before I understood myself as a visual artist, I understood expression through the body—through the relationship among music, disciplined technique, rhythm, and motion that I experienced as a figure skater.
In my paintings, repeated marks create rhythm, while color, line, and form convey movement and emotion. I am drawn to simple, familiar subjects—cotton bolls, apples, flowers, and the human figure—and to the ways an ordinary form can hold a much larger story.
My work is also about coming home. Home, for me, is not simply a geographic place. It is memory, identity, belonging, and the gradual return to oneself. Having left Alabama at twelve and built lives in Delaware, Nashville, New York, and Houston, I find myself returning through art to the places, people, and experiences that have shaped me.
Each work becomes part of that return: an exploration of what we carry with us, what changes as we move through the world, and how home itself continues to become.