Sharon Mirtaheri was raised in Radford, Virginia. Her family has lived in the Appalachian Mountains for over a hundred and fifty years and her mother’s parents were dairy farmers. Appalachian themes such as quilting, weaving of memory, storytelling, farming and gardening, and mountain landscapes are just a few of the themes she explores in her artwork.

Sharon took cosmetology as vocational training in high school and started a thirty-year career the day after she graduated. She says, “I loved my career as a hairstylist and was very successful at it.” Sharon won many hairstyling competitions including first place in a hair photo competition that garnered her a $2,000 prize which she used to go to Las Vegas to witness the Hairstyling Olympics. The United States won the gold prize that year against forty other countries. She also won first, second and third place in the East Coast Grand Championship held in York, Pennsylvania which garnered her three trophies—one of which stood at seven feet. 

Sharon’s work as a hairstylist has been published in Coiffure Q and Passion magazines six times, and once as the cover for Men’s Passion magazine with a two-page layout inside. She has done the hair for a dance company catalog, television commercials and beauty pageants. “Seventy percent of my clientele in Maryland came to me for twenty four years until I moved away. That is what I am most proud of.” 

A rotator cuff surgery effectively ended her career and, in 2004, she moved from Gaithersburg, Maryland to Roanoke, Virginia near her birthplace. In 2005 she founded Angels with Scissors for the Roanoke Rescue Mission. Forty-three salons and one-hundred and fifty hairstylists joined in raising money to build a hair salon inside the mission’s Battered Women’s Shelter building. A three-chair, one-sink salon, exists inside the Learning Center where volunteer hairstylists go to serve those who seek shelter. Tens of thousands of haircuts have been done since the founding of the salon. 

When Sharon lived in Maryland she took private oil painting lessons with Denny Arrant, a master lifelong painter and restoration artist. She says, “Denny was a client of the salon I worked in and I was extremely fortunate to have started with a master painter who became a close friend. I was drawn to painting in order to capture my garden and flowers that I missed deeply during winter. Like gardening, I found painting to be a spiritual pursuit.”  

After founding Angels with Scissors Sharon began her college journey in the fall of 2005, at Hollins University, at the age of forty-six. She attended full time for seven years and graduated in 2010 with a Bachelors of Art degree with a concentration in studio art and a minor in creative writing. Two years into her college journey she had a class with Professor Nancy Dahlstrom in monotype printmaking and changed her concentration from oil painting to printmaking. “There seemed to be so many more possibilities in printmaking and I fell in love with it like a giddy teenager!” she states. 

After her undergrad degree she went on to attain a Masters of Liberal Arts degree in Encaustic Wax Collage. Sharon graduated Magna cum Laude with honors. She was awarded the Evelyn Bradshaw award. After graduating she was a member of the Roanoke Market Gallery for three years until she fell ill. Seven years later, after regaining her health, she turned her master’s thesis into her first book—Finding Myself in Salvaged Layers: How Encaustic Art Healed Me.  

Sharon is currently working on a three-book memoir—the first nearly finished—and spends her time writing, gardening and making art.

Sharon’s favorite quote comes from Tim Robbins: “It is never too late to have a happy childhood!”