New York and Florida artist Ruth Dryden Deshaies (1931-2017) at MacMurray College in Illinois, winning a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Europe. She later earned a Carnegie Fellowship to study at Tulane University and also studied at the Ogunquit School of Art and Indiana University (where she met her future husband, the noted printmaker Arthur Deshaies). Dryden Deshaies lived and worked in New York and Boston until the 1960s when she moved to Florida, where she taught art for many years at the college level in Tallahassee. she was hired as one of the first art department faculty members at what is now Tallahassee State College. She taught drawing, painting, design, and art history for nearly thirty years. She was an affiliate of the LeMoyne Art Foundation in Tallahassee, Florida from the time of its founding in the 1960s Her work can be seen in collections nationwide.