Tonia Lee Royston

A native Californian who grew up in Marin County, Tonia is the daughter of landscape architect Robert N. Royston and dress designer Evelyn Royston.

In school, Tonia loved to doodle in class (when she should have been paying attention to her teachers!): color and design were her passions. “To have a blank piece of paper and a box of crayons—this gave me the ultimate feeling of joy!” she says.

After graduating from San Francisco’s Lone Mountain College with a degree in music, she moved to New York to study jazz singing and went on to perform in many of the City’s club venues. While in New York, she also trained as a pastry chef at Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School (now the Institute of Culinary Education) and later was employed as such by one of America’s renowned restaurants, Larry Forgione’s An American Place. 

Life has taken Tonia in many different (and entrepreneurial) creative directions. Reflecting on her abundant adventures and experiences, she compares her life to “a beautiful pastry concocted of many delicious ingredients.”

Tonia’s latest body of work, begun this past March 2020, is comprised of a series of abstract/mixed media collages on paper. These works embody wondrous landscapes of shapes and colors and employ paint, colored pen, and other objects, including antique paper and fabric.

“When I begin a new piece, I sit and clear my mind—a kind of meditation time. Doing this, colors and shapes become more vivid and, like working with a puzzle, everything eventually fits nicely together and has a native, gentle flow,” Tonia says. “I am most content when I am creating.”