Reverend Joyce McDonald (b. 1951; Brooklyn, New York) lives and works in New York. A self-taught, visionary multidisciplinary artist, activist, and minister, McDonald fuses experience with strength, hope, and power. In her tender sculptural works, she enshrines her own life stories and wider cultural experiences of family, love, loss, illness, healing, transformation, and transcendence.

As a teenager, she performed at the Apollo Theater in the girl group The Primettes. After her HIV diagnosis in 1985—the result of a long battle with addiction—McDonald was ordained as a minister at the Church of the Open Door in Brooklyn in 2009. She uses her own struggles to drive her work as an artist, activist, advocate, and self-identified “spiritual nurse.”

Through her art and ministry, McDonald shares her contagious joy and love and inspires women to get in touch with their inner beauty and dignity. She uses sculptures, painting, poetry, and song to help people find healing. Her work as an activist and advocate includes founding an HIV awareness and creative arts group for young girls and teens, working with women in shelters and hospitals, writing letters to incarcerated women, coordinating her church's AIDS ministry, and serving as assistant director of the children's choir. She is also an active artist-member of Visual AIDS. McDonald is the proud mother of two daughters, and has two sons-in-law, eleven grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

McDonald is represented by Gordon Robichaux, New York, where she presented her first solo exhibition in 2021, and by Maureen Paley, London, UK, where she presented her first solo exhibition in 2023. She has participated in numerous group shows including at Maureen Paley, London; Marc Selwyn Gallery, Los Angeles; Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; in Souls Grown Diaspora (curated by Sam Gordon), apexart, New York; AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism, Museum of the City of New York; Everyday, La MaMa Galleria, New York; Persons of Interest (curated by Sam Gordon), Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, New York; Curated, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, New York; taken-up, Judson Memorial Church, New York; and HIV+WOMEN+ART at Puffin Foundation Gallery, Teaneck, New Jersey.

McDonald’s work has been celebrated in The New York Times on two occasions, and is held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.