Diane Best is the featured artist for the inaugural Shay’s Warriors I AM HOPE: Life After Cancer Retreat at The Ritz-Carlton, Rancho Mirage. The installation is curated by Constance Bloom of C. Bloom Design and That Gallery, featuring a selection of Best’s Other Worlds series as the artistic centerpiece of an immersive environment created to support healing, reflection, and renewal. Best’s atmospheric landscapes—exploring themes of resilience, transformation, and the restorative power of nature—beautifully complement the retreat’s mission, inviting guests into contemplative spaces where art, hope, and healing converge.

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Diane Best was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied in the San Francisco area at Stanford University and the San Francisco Art Institute before moving to Los Angeles. There, she developed a successful career creating commercial artwork for the entertainment industry and commissioned portraiture, while continuing to exhibit her independent work.

In 1995, Best relocated to Joshua Tree, California, where her practice underwent a decisive shift. Immersed in the Mojave Desert, she began focusing on the dramatic intensity of the landscape through painting, photography, and moving-image work.

Seeking out remote and uninhabited terrain, her work captures fleeting moments of converging light and land—reflecting a deep commitment to both preservation and direct experience.

Working in the lineage of 19th-century American conservationist artists, Best brings a contemporary lens to landscape painting and filmmaking, informed by photography, cinema, digital imaging, animation, and theories of perception rooted in deep ecology.

After more than two decades exploring the deserts of the American Southwest, Best expanded her focus to the polar regions, traveling to Iceland, Greenland, South Georgia Island, and Antarctica. She identifies a profound connection between these “hot” and “cold” deserts—environments defined by vast scale, minimal human presence, and an overwhelming, often disquieting beauty that informs her emotionally resonant landscapes.

Her recent body of work, Other Worlds, marks a further evolution. Created during a period of personal and global upheaval, the series draws from memory, imagination, and limited returns to the desert as she navigates ongoing health challenges. These paintings move beyond direct observation into immersive, atmospheric spaces that merge external landscape with internal experience—inviting viewers into contemplative environments that are at once familiar and unbound by place.

Best has also been profiled in publications including Lifescapes: West Coast Art & Design, Palm Springs Life Art & Culture Magazine, Art Patron Magazine, and Telluride Inside, and was the subject of a KCET Artbound documentary (PBS Los Angeles). In 2020, she was selected as a Joshua Tree National Park Artist representing the U.S. Park Pass program.