Reverend Joyce McDonald (b. 1951; Brooklyn, New York) lives and works in New York.

As a teenager, she performed at the Apollo Theater in the girl group The Primettes. After her HIV diagnosis in 1985, and a long battle with addiction, McDonald was ordained as a minister at the Church of the Open Door in 2009. She uses her own struggles to drive her work as an artist, activist, advocate, and “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 sculpture, 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 its 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 presented solo exhibitions at Gordon Robichaux, New York, in 2024 and 2021, and at Maureen Paley, London, in 2023, which was profiled in The Guardian, The Art Newspaper, and Artforum. Her work has been celebrated in The New York Times on three occasions. She has participated in
numerous group exhibitions including in Hove, UK, at Maureen Paley: Morena
di Luna; in Los Angeles at STARS Gallery, Marc Selwyn Gallery, and Parker
Gallery; in New York as part of the exhibitions Origin Story at Gordon
Robichaux, Souls Grown Diaspora at apexart (organized by Sam Gordon),
AIDS at Home (Art and Everyday Activism) at the Museum of the City of New
York, Everyday at La Mama Galleria, PERSONS OF INTEREST at the Bureau of General Services–Queer Division (organized by Sam Gordon), Curated at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, and taken-up at Judson Memorial Church; and in New Jersey as part of HIV+WOMEN+ART at Puffin Foundation Gallery.

McDonald’s work is held in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.