Jenny Baham

Born in Taipei, Jenny spent the first half of her working life far from a canvas, climbing a technology career across Asia for companies like Apple, SAS and Gartner. It was a full, demanding life — and in 2005 it caught up with her. A health scare brought on by stress sent her to a doctor who told her, simply, to balance her life. She signed up for a beginner pencil sketching class expecting nothing more than a hobby. She found her calling instead. She still describes it as a gift from God. That gift became a discipline in 2008, when she began training under the internationally renowned Master Jiun Pan, refining the smooth line and accurate color that now define her oil paintings. She immigrated to the United States in 2013 and made Las Vegas home. She isn't painting the American West in any loose, general sense. Jenny is painting the National Parks — one at a time, deliberately, with the stated ambition of eventually painting them all. Toroweap's sheer drop into the Grand Canyon, the river bend at Horseshoe Bend, the snow-lined arch of Natural Bridge at Bryce, Zion, Glacier, Yellowstone, Joshua Tree — each canvas marks a park she has actually stood in, sketchbook or camera in hand, before ever touching the easel. It's a running, unfinished project, and she talks about it less as a series than as a list she intends to complete. Since 2014, Jenny has taught pencil sketching and oil painting at the College of Southern Nevada, and teaching has become as much a part of her identity as painting itself. Her students range from five years old to seventy, and she takes the same patience into every one of those lessons — sketch first, get the line honest, then let color find its own light, the same discipline Master Jiun Pan gave her. She has curated two exhibitions built entirely around her students' own work: Imagine in 2022 at Spring Valley Library Gallery, and Artistic Attack in 2024 in the Chamber Gallery at Las Vegas City Hall, where students as young as twelve saw their paintings hung, labeled and opened to the public under her direction. More than a few of those students have gone on to receive Congressional recognition of their own — proof, to Jenny, that teaching someone to paint is really teaching them to see. Her own exhibition record now runs four years deep at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the NPO Japan International Art Institute has awarded her a prize every single year since 2022: the Japan China Art Award, the Excellence Award, the International Peace Prize for My Husband — her portrait of her husband, Mel — and most recently the 2025 Art Excellence Award. Closer to home, the City of Las Vegas purchased her painting Symphony for its permanent public art collection in 2024, and she has taken Best in Show at both the Clark County CityScapes exhibition and the Wetlands Park Take to the Trails competition. In 2019 alone she received six Special Congressional Recognitions — from Senators Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, Representatives Steven Horsford, Dina Titus and Susie Lee, and Assemblyman Alexander Assefa — with two more following in 2021, bringing her total to eight. She continues to write a monthly column on painting and faith for the Las Vegas Chinese News Network, and still lives in Las Vegas with Mel, working her way, park by park, toward that list.