Joan Wadleigh Curran, a former senior lecturer of painting and drawing in the Weitzman School of Design, died on March 29 of complications from metastatic cancer. She was 72.

Ms. Wadleigh Curran was born April 27, 1950, in Paterson, New Jersey. Her family moved to Needham, Massachusetts when she was five. She earned a bachelor’s degree in art from Skidmore College in 1972 and a master’s degree in fine arts at Yale University in 1974.

Inspired to draw and paint nature with what she said was “a sense of human intervention or human touch,” Ms. Wadleigh Curran created works that featured themes of regeneration, the cycle of life, and the coexistence of disparate objects. She worked in charcoal, paint, and other media for more than 50 years, and her pieces have been displayed in hundreds of exhibitions, galleries, and private collections around the world.

Ms. Wadleigh Curran had cerebral palsy since birth, and her physical challenges, coupled with the joy she found in life, were often reflected in her art. She constantly balanced struggle and happiness, career, and family, and the coexistence of such contrasts appear in her work as colorful vines entwined in old chicken wire and beautiful flowers placed amid the debris and wreckage of industrial life. Most recently, she turned woodcuts into collages, a permutation she described as an artistic “language.”

Ms. Wadleigh Curran held solo exhibitions at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., the Wagner Free Institute of Science, and many other galleries in Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere. She was featured in more than 100 group exhibitions, including those at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia; and the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown.

She was a senior lecturer in Penn’s School of Design, now the Weitzman School, from 2001 to 2016. She also taught at Moore College of Art and Design, Swarthmore College, Drexel University, Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, and other colleges in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Georgia.

Ms. Wadleigh Curran was on the board of governors of the Print Center in Center City and co-curated its well-received 2002 art exhibition Imprint: A Public Art Project. She spent time as an artist-in-residence at the prestigious Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy and the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland, and won, among other awards, the 1985 Tobeleah Wechsler Award from the Cheltenham Arts Center.

She is survived by her daughters, Maris and Mia; her grandson; her brother, Jim; former husband, Walter Curran, Jr.; and other relatives.

A private memorial service is to be held Sunday, April 30. Donations in her name may be made to Recycled Artist in Residency, 7333 Milnor St., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19136.