About Sonia

Sonia Taboada Jackson Summers graduated in 2008 from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she studied "Illustration and Writing" through the College Scholars Program. Her cartoons were featured in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville student newspaper, The Daily Beacon, and she provided cartoons and illustrations for the UTK yearbook, Evolve. In 2007, Sonia interned at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

In 2009-2010 Sonia provided artwork for church bulletins through the J.S. Paluch Company, Inc. Some of Sonia's artwork has been printed in Gilbert Magazine in 2010, and in 2011 her cartoon "Fred, the Sheepdog" featured on her cartooning website, http://cartoonsbysoniajackson.weebly.com was printed in St. Mary's Messenger Magazine.

In 2011 Sonia married and moved to her husband's hometown, Birmingham, Alabama. Through 2019 she regularly exhibited her work in varied venues across the greater Birmingham region, and was requested for portraits, illustrations, and landscape paintings. She sold art while exhibiting in the 16th Annual Energen Art Competition. In 2018 she was chosen to implement her Silver and Black Organic Mosaic design for a replica Vulcan Statue as part of the "Vulcans on Parade" public art project. Her painted Vulcan titled "Facets of Birmingham" stands at the front entrance of Magic City Dentistry in Downtown Birmingham, and is viewable to customers entering and even passersby on the street.

Sonia currently has work for sale at the Blue Phrog Gallery in Montevallo, Alabama.

An enthusiast for public art, Sonia has won several sidewalk chalk art competitions in the Birmingham area, and more recently in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She also regularly paints en plein air (painting outdoors onsight), and her plein air portfolio includes the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C., Monticello in Virginia, urban scenes in Knoxville, as well as the occasional beach scene.

While art, family, and faith are her life, her hobby is rock climbing. Sonia regularly competes (and places) in local bouldering and climbing competitions across the South.

Sonia currently resides again in Knoxville, with her husband William Zachary Summers, their children, dogs, and cats.

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