Lois Gibson

Lois Gibson promotes other forensic artists who want to join her profession. She wrote Forensic Art Essentials to convey her techniques to practicing artists and those wishing to enter the field. Realizing there are less than 20 full-time forensic artists in the entire USA and not one full-time forensic artist in the UK, Gibson has made it her mission to advocate and develop forensic artists wherever she can. Some of the numerous forensic artists she has helped launch in the United States of America are Officer Luis Santoyo who became Chicago’s forensic artist in 2003. She trained and nurtured the first forensic artist in Israel, Gil Gibli. Her training has propelled the career of Florin Lazau in Romania, Filipe Franco in Portugal, and many other forensic artists world-wide.

Gibson was nearly killed in a violent attack at age 21. Lois describes how she gained justice for that attack in her true-crime book, Faces of Evil (New Horizon Press, 2004). Knowing what it feels like to be a victim of crime is the impetus for her creation of the forensic art position serving the Houston Police Department and surrounding areas since 1981. Graduating with Honors from the University of Texas at Austin, she now teaches forensic art at Northwestern University Center for Public Safety in the near-Chicago suburb of Evanston Illinois. During her early 20’s Lois drew approximately 3,000 fine-art portraits of tourists posing live on the River Walk in San Antonio Texas. She attended the University of Texas Health Science Center Dental School in San Antonio and completed the forensic art training at the FBI National Academy in Quantico VA.

Gibson is in the Guinness Book of Records for being the single artist whose drawings have identified the most perpetrators of any forensic artist in the world. Gibson created the first forensic sketch shown on America’s Most Wanted and has found success through the years with drawings shown there and on other crime-fighting programs. Gibson’s 2007 drawing of an unidentified murdered infant girl who washed up in a plastic box on a Galveston beach and was dubbed “Baby Grace” by locals, prompted the tiny girl’s grandmother to call authorities with her identity. Even though that Grandmother was a thousand miles away in Mentor Ohio, Gibson’s drawing reached out via the internet and helped authorities find the two people who thought they could murder 2-year-old Riley Sawyers and get away by hiding her identity.

Gibson has been profiled in People Magazine and Oprah’s O Magazine, on the CBS Early Show, Good Morning America, Dateline NBC, Reader’s Digest, Discovery Channel, ABC’s 20/20, Fox News and many more. An entire RELENTLESS episode on the Oxygen Channel focused on Gibson’s help solving a notorious Kansas serial-rapist case. A team of experienced writers and producers are now working on creating a television movie/series on Lois Gibson’s life and work.

Lois Gibson has a son and daughter ages 27 and 24. She resides in Spring Texas and paints oil portraits of prominent Houstonians including Mayor Bob Lanier for the City of Houston Public Works Building. Her surrealistic landscape paintings are shown in prominent galleries. However, as long as she has the strength, she plans to use her talents to help law enforcement stop evil doers and support other artists to do the same.