Ed Mell grew up in Phoenix, where his family was long residence of the Valley of the Sun. In 1970 he attended school in Los Angeles at the Art Center College of Design, after graduation Ed began working as a graphic artist at an advertising agency in New York, Ed accepted a summer teaching position at the Hopi reservation for two summers. Time spent on Arizona’s Colorado Plateau reconnected Mell with Arizona and the people and land he loved and his artistic course for the next fifty years was charted. He relocated to Phoenix and began painting his well-known landscapes and imagery of the inhabitants of the Southwest.