Julia Thecla Connell (1896–1973) was born in Delavan, Illinois, and developed an early passion for art. She attended Illinois State University in Normal for a summer before relocating to Chicago in 1920 to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). To support herself, she worked in art and antique restoration. During the Great Depression, she contributed to the Works Progress Administration’s "easel division."
Thecla began to gain national recognition for her work in the 1940s, with a notable exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943. That same year, she was included in Peggy Guggenheim's Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York. She was connected to artists like Ivan Albright and Gertrude Abercrombie and became part of Chicago’s surrealist movement, producing works that were both haunting and whimsical. Active in Chicago’s artistic circles during the 1940s, her popularity waned in the 1950s as abstraction took center stage in the art world. Thecla died in relative obscurity in Chicago in 1973.
