Shannon “Shan” Fannin was born in Long Beach, California. She earned a college scholarship to pursue a degree in special needs education, but life had other plans. She put becoming an artist on hold for marriage, a career in marketing, business ownership, and homeschooling her son for 16 years. Using her portfolio as a resume, she briefly returned to teaching elementary school art through a private academy.

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After a 25-year hiatus from her own art career, Shan returned to the classroom to refresh her abilities. She took community college courses to reacquaint herself with various mediums, finding a particular love for figurative life drawing as she began building her expressionistic style.

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The pivot to her current specialty began when her husband added a 1961 Ford Thunderbird to their family garage. Shan began attending car shows, where she enjoyed meeting owners and discussing the history behind their machines. Mesmerized by the reflections and sleek lines, she realized the correlation between the "bodies" of the vehicles and the figurative drawings she had been making. When her husband encouraged her to paint a vehicle, she took on the challenge wholeheartedly by painting an orange GMC truck. She realized immediately that being a vehicle artist was her future and became a professional artist in February 2015.

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Today, Shan creates large-scale canvas paintings—up to 6 feet long—and is working toward painting larger-than-life vehicles. She brings these machines to life using a unique tactile application, painting reflection segments with her fingers and palms in addition to brushes. While many categorize her work as Photorealism, Shan prefers to describe her style as a balance of 10% abstraction and 90% realism. She works primarily with high-quality acrylics by Liquitex and Golden (using Matisse and Lukas for backgrounds), favoring bold colors to capture the vibrancy of chrome and carbon fiber.

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Shan’s work has achieved international acclaim and placement in prestigious locations. Her paintings have been featured on the billboards of Times Square in NYC and immortalized in space, with five of her images archived on the Moon through the Lunar Codex project. She has collaborated with several museums and charities and built an exclusive collector base. Her works are owned by Major League Baseball and NFL players, drivers and personalities from F1, IndyCar, and IMSA, and corporate leaders from major automotive companies, including Porsche and Ford. Her paintings have won numerous national and international Best of Show and Honorable Mentions including with the International Guild of Realism and Bill Neale National Best of Automotive Art Award. Shan was recently awarded a permanent commission for two large scale painting with the Austin Bergstrom International Airport extension opening 2030. 

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When not painting, Shan shares her marketing knowledge as a guest writer for magazines. She is also an avid vegetable gardener,  spinner, and classic movie fan. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband of 35 years and their three rescue dogs.