Anita C. Young is the winner of the 2018 Pollack Purchase Award from Washburn University, and winner of Best in Show for the Human Experience versus Abstract Exhibition at the Tomahawk Art Center. Her passion is to create artworks that focus on mental health to make open dialogue easier. She is now a full-time freelance artist and focuses primarily on pet portraits. Choosing to create pet portraits was a natural outcrop of mental health given all the benefits, mental and physical, our pets give us. When she has free time she also is a writer. She has written one complete urban fantasy series and is currently working on her young adult fantasy series.

Anita C. Young was born and raised in Canada before marrying a US Army soldier. The couple moved around the world before finally settling in Topeka, where she obtained her B.S. in Medical Laboratory Science from Washburn in 2010.  After almost a decade of serving the community at a local hospital, Ms. Young decided to pursue her lifetime love of art at Washburn.