Artist Robert Lentz, O.F.M., is a Franciscan friar of the Holy Name Province stationed at Holy Name College in Silver Spring, MD. Born in Colorado, the grandchild of Russians who emigrated in the early 1900s, Lentz studied Byzantine iconography as an apprentice of a master painter in a Greek Orthodox monastery founded from Mount Athos. Lentz paints, teaches apprentices, writes, and conducts workshops on art and spirituality throughout the United States.

While always striving to remain true to the essence of Byzantine iconography, Lentz adapts traditional conventions in order to inspire Christians today, creating icons of biblical figures, saints, and contemporary models of holiness that portray Christianity as a living and global tradition. Reproductions of his work appear in Christ in the Margins with text by Edwina Gateley (2003) and A Passion for Life: Fragments of the Face of God with text by Joan Chittister, O.S.B. (1996).