Bryan Parker grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He served in the U.S. Army and was deployed to Iraq. He graduated from the Insititute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in 2010 with a bachelor’s of fine arts in new media arts. Parker currently lives in South Dakota with his wife, an award-wining Lakota bead artist. Parker describes his artistic process as follows: “With my work, I like to identify one subject and really focus on that in detail. The rest is improvised along the way. I don’t really set out and plan the whole composition. A painting can change, just like a story can change as you’re writing it.”