10 Women Street Artists You Need to Know in Metro Phoenix

Let’s face it. Women don’t always get the respect they deserve when it comes to street art or graffiti culture. Consider this roundup of 10 women street artists your friendly reminder that plenty of women are making significant contributions to the urban landscape in metro Phoenix.

Amanda Adkins
Street art by Amanda Adkins graces several buildings in downtown Phoenix — including the east-facing exterior wall at The Hive, where you’ll find her take on the joyous movement of a woman donning a big, beautiful head of dark, wavy hair (painted with Katie Beltran). She’s also painted a wall (with Jessica Kerlin) that borders the entrance to the Black Theatre Troupe’s building using scenes from some of their previous productions. You’ll find a mural depicting her daughter on the top of an exterior wall at {9} The Gallery.

Yai Cecream
Yai’s whimsical designs grace the interiors of several local businesses, from Even Stephens in downtown Phoenix to Welcome Chicken + Donuts in south Phoenix. Sometimes, she does guerilla-style street art, leaving her marks along urban pathways while transforming objects like giant trash dumpsters into a playful canvas. Her collaboration with Ashley Macias graces a west-facing wall at Space 55, but you can find her solo work on a small bit of wall just east of Cobra Arcade Bar.

Lauren Lee
For several years, the Three Birds mural Lee painted on the east-facing exterior wall of GreenHaus served as a way-finding tool and photo backdrop. Baron Properties demolished that building to make way for multi-level apartments, but later commissioned Lee to create a new trio of birds that tower over the downtown landscape. Her work also graces walls at Oasis on Grand, Street Coffee, and Mesa Urban Garden. You’ll find a mural painted for the IN FLUX Cycle 4 public art project on a building just near Vision Gallery in Chandler, and her 153-foot Don’t Wake the Dreamer mural commissioned by the City of Tempe on a wall adjacent to Jaycee Park.

Laura Spalding Best
The utility lines dotting metro Phoenix streets have inspired much of Laura Spalding Best’s body of work, which includes her Centennial mural painted on the south-facing wall for the APS Power Station located at Second and Garfield Streets. And twice, she’s painted murals on a shipping container gallery in Roosevelt Row. (The first was defaced during Paint PHX 2015.) Keep an eye on a new development going in across from Grand ArtHaus, because Best says she's already been commissioned to paint a mural once that new building goes up.

Maggie Keane
Maggie Keane has been quietly making street art for years, but her tribute to David Bowie, painted in the aftermath of the musical icon’s January 2016 death, put her painting prowess on full view along the east side of Seventh Street just north of McDowell Road. She’s spent decades doing forensic drawings in courtrooms, but also does other types of artwork, ranging from billboards to fine art portraits.

Read on for more of Phoenix's must-know women street artists. 
Ashley Macias
A mural featuring Macias’ characteristic depiction of the human form, which infuses elements of interior and exterior anatomy with abstraction, graces a west-facing exterior wall at the building currently housing Space 55. A human figure she once painted on the northern side of an alley located at 15th and Oak streets behind Barrio Café has been painted over by several graffiti artists including MES, KAPER, and others. But she’s created new works since, including a mural located just east of The Coronado on Seventh Street.

Kyllan Maney
You’ll find Kyllan Maney’s garden-themed street art gracing a long wall located inside Mesa Urban Garden, where she collaborated with Lauren Lee to create a mural that incorporates plants, birds, city buildings, and the bust of a woman whose neck bears roots. Look for her mural commissioned by the City of Tempe along a west facing wall at The Dhaba restaurant. Maney often involves students at New School for the Arts and Academics in mural projects, thereby helping to inspire a whole new generation of street artists.

Carrie Marill
Highlights of the Roosevelt Row streetscape include Carrie Marill’s circular patchwork piece on the south-facing side of ASU Art Museum’s Project Space. And for several years now, we’ve enjoyed another Marill mural. It's an homage to the late iconic street artist Margaret Kilgallen located on the west-facing exterior for DWF Wholesale Florists at Second Street off Roosevelt Street. That piece, twice defaced and repainted, depicts a bicyclist trailing a long stream of flowers. Before the bungalow that housed GROWop boutique got sold to developers, that building was home to a Marill mural filled with silhouettes of objects ranging from shoes to shovels. Marill is represented by Lisa Sette Gallery.

Noelle Martinez
Bentley Projects got two new murals on a south-facing wall during Paint PHX 2016, an event that brought together artists from Arizona and beyond to create several fresh works of street art. Martinez painted
pop culture imagery with candy colors to convey themes of youth and power. It marks the next level in the growth of this young artist, who previously exhibited at Willo North gallery and The Hive. For her Swift Change mural, Martinez infused her own sensibilities into the space rather than focusing on the familiar.

Beatrice Moore
A couple years ago, Moore painted Between Innocence and Knowing on an east-facing exterior wall of her Kooky Krafts Shop. The work features an assortment of whimsical creatures painted against a pastel backdrop graced by a pink polka dot frame. She’s helping other women street artists, too. When former Phoenix resident Rebecca Green traveled from Denver to paint a new piece for an exterior wall at The Lodge Art Studio, Moore donated much of the paint that helped bring Green’s desert animal scene to life. And she’s also been known to feature political art, including an anti-Trump image, on her billboard in the Grand Avenue arts district.

Editor's note: This post has been updated from its original version, which first appeared in May 2015.