Artist John Morrell, a native of Albany, New York, has painted and taught in the Washington, DC area for over thirty years. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Georgetown University and his Masters of Fine Arts degree from George Washington University. He has taught in the Art Departments of both universities. From 1984 to 2002 he was the Gallery Director and a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. He is currently chair of the Department of Art and Art History and is an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing.

April of 1979 marked Morrell's first solo exhibition of landscape paintings done in Brittany, France. Since then there has been seventeen other solo exhibitions, many group exhibitions, and numerous commissions for private and corporate collections.

In 1980 Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired a mixed media work by Morrell. Curator Willem de Looper of the Phillips Collection awarded a grisaille landscape by John Morrell "Best in Show" at Athenaeum's Fourteenth Annual Juried Show in 1984. The United States Postal Service chose Morrell's depiction of Healy Hall as the image on a postcard in an historic building series in 1989. In 1994 John Morrell received a Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 2004 he was a Visiting Artist and guest lecturer at the Savannah College of Art and Design where he presented From The Ground Up, a solo exhibition of drawings. In 2005 he presented a solo exhibition of urban landscapes at Galerie Lee in Paris. John Morrell was invited to join the artists of New York's Atlantic Gallery in 2006.
He presented solo exhibitions at New York's Prince Street Gallery and Atlantic Gallery in 2007. In 2008 Morrell exhibited recent work at Addison-Ripley Fine Art in Washington and Sherry French Gallery in New York.

In recent years his work has focused on wash drawings heightened in white and paintings of nature in the urban environment.