Visual Art

Cynthia Millhorn is a storyteller, visual artist, and educator whose creative practice spans more than two decades and more than a dozen mediums. From oil paint to digital illustration, from photography to puppetry and stage design, she moves between disciplines the way a storyteller moves between characters — with full commitment and genuine curiosity.

She owned and operated Appalachian Mood Studio, her own art studio in Johnson City, Tennessee, and has led workshops and classes in East Tennessee, Atlanta, Georgia, Los Angeles, California, and Cape Town, South Africa. Her work as an educator is inseparable from her work as an artist — she teaches from the inside of the creative process, not from the outside looking in.

She believes art is not a skill you either have or you don't. It is a language anyone can learn — and everyone deserves the chance to speak it.

As a visual art instructor, Cynthia has worked with students from preschool through college age and beyond — at ETSU's Renaissance Camp, Creative Arts & Aftercare, Bespoke Tutoring, and in workshops across four cities on two continents. She brings the same warmth, rigor, and belief in every student to every room she walks into.

Her teaching is rooted in a simple truth she has lived as an artist: the distance between what we envision and what we can make is not a wall — it is the very space where growth happens. She has watched students who arrived convinced they had no artistic ability leave with a body of work that surprised even them.

To explore working with Cynthia as an art instructor, click Hire an Art Instructor above.