Brenda Welty

About the Create! Magazine 10th Anniversary Book: Create! Magazine is honored to celebrate a decade of contemporary art by publishing a look back at previously selected artists: their achievements, career growth, and more since being published. Stay tuned for the book launch in fall 2026, and join our newsletter to stay up to date.

Brenda Kay Welty, featured in both Create! Magazine and the Create! Magazine10th Anniversary Book, is a fine art photographer based in York. She received an Associate of Arts degree in Photography from Community College of Baltimore County in 1988 and later earned a Bachelor of Arts in New Media Photography from Southern New Hampshire University in 2018. Her academic background also includes studies through University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Johns Hopkins University, where she pursued visual arts and biomedical photography.

Her career has spanned medical, commercial, and fine art photography, leading to a distinctive studio practice centered on layered photographic imagery and visual storytelling. Welty’s work explores memory, transformation, architecture, nature, and emotional experience through layered digital collage, double exposure, and painterly photographic techniques.

Influenced by cinematic atmosphere, surrealist aesthetics, architectural decay, and the interplay of light and texture, she creates dreamlike compositions that blur the line between photography and painting.

Her work has been exhibited at Creative York, York Art Association, FotoFoto Gallery, HIVE Artspace, the Healing Arts Gallery at WellSpan Health, Penn State Children’s Hospital, Burg Magazine of Harrisburg, Pa., and Metta Gallery, where her piece Calm Beckons received First Place in the Flora exhibition.

She was also selected as an Emerging Artist for the Long's Park Art Festival and received the Creative Entrepreneur Accelerator Award from the Cultural Alliance of York.

Welty’s limited-edition works are individually hand printed by the artist using archival pigment inks and museum-quality fine art paper. Her current work continues to explore the intersection of memory, atmosphere, and transformation through immersive photographic compositions.


Artist Statement

I use photographs to create impressions of life in an illustrative way. My process is to take photographs that catch my eye—usually because of the color, the light, or a certain feeling or emotion they portray. Later, I use these different, sometimes unrelated, photos together by layering, blending, and stripping colors. Through this practice, the beginning of an idea will reveal itself.

Ultimately, I create places, settings, and portraits that feel vibrant or muted, strong or subtle, giving an emotional feeling.


https://www.welty.com