Amy Wetsch

When she was eight years old, Amy Wetsch begged her parents for a microscope so that she could look at pond water under the slides. Her fascination with biology had just begun—she was in and out of doctors’ offices for Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune illness—and the microscope became her portal to processing the world around her. “I wished I could see what was going on inside my body,” she says of that time in her life. Later, in high school and college, painting became a way to deal with her chronic pain.