[4] She married Air Force surgeon George Wayne in 1940, and in 1942 he was deployed to serve in the European theater of World War II.

[6] While her husband was in Europe, Wayne first moved to Los Angeles and learned production illustration at Caltech, where she received training for work converting blueprints to drawings for the aircraft industry.

[6] In 1957, Wayne traveled to Paris to collaborate with French master printer Marcel Durassier, who was the printmaker for artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, Marc Chagall and more,[9] first on lithographs illustrating the love sonnets of English poet John Donne and then on an artist's book also based on Donne's poetry.

[10] Wayne ultimately produced 123 copies of the finished book, one of which gained interest from Wilson MacNeil "Mac" Lowry, director of the arts and humanities programs at the Ford Foundation.

[6] When Wayne met with Lowry in 1958, she expressed frustration about having to go to Europe to find collaborators for her lithography projects, printmaking at the time in the US more associated with posters than fine art.

[6] Some artists, like Tamarind's first artist-in-residence, Romas Viesulas, already had experience as print makers, while others who came to Tamarind, such as Josef and Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Bruce Conner, Richard Diebenkorn, Burhan Doğançay, John Dowell,[14] Claire Falkenstein, Sam Francis, Françoise Gilot, Philip Guston, Richard Hunt, Louise Nevelson, Ed Ruscha, Rufino Tamayo, Charles White, had worked primarily in other media.

Wayne, acutely aware of the underrepresentation of women and African Americans in the art world, made a point of including many in the Tamarind roster, rare at the time.

[15] In 1970, Wayne felt her mission was accomplished, resigned as director and arranged for the workshop's transfer to the University of New Mexico where, as the Tamarind Institute, it continues today.

Friendships or associations with other scientists followed, including Richard Feynman, Jonas Salk, inventor of the Polio vaccine, and a number of contacts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which became the world center for space exploration in the 1960s.

The double helix of DNA itself was a source for several years of Wayne’ image making in the early 1970s.”[18] “She depicted scientific discoveries in poetic rather than illustrative ways […] recognizing that too close a relationship to the facts work against the metaphysical and aesthetic potentials” (Jay Belloli)[19] In 1971, after the transfer of Tamarind Lithography Workshop to the University of New Mexico, Wayne traveled to France.

She had deep ties to the country, having created her John Donne series in the 50s there, and developed friendships with master printers such as Marcel Durassier, who was the printmaker for artists including Picasso, Matisse, Dali, Marc Chagall and more.

Instead, she returned often to check on their work and make sure that everything was progressing as she envisioned it.” [22] During her time collaborating with the French ateliers, Wayne created twelve tapestry images, all of which had fewer than four examples, and some destroyed as not to her liking.

In these characteristics, Wayne found a direct and appropriate way by which she could transmit to the viewer a sense of time passing that is internal to the process.

She can lead the viewer beyond real time to read certain works at a quickened pace, or to perceive others in extended cosmic time.”[25] In 1984, Wayne returned to painting, the medium with which she had begun her career in Chicago, and Mexico City as a young artist.

“In the Cognitos Series (later referred to as the Djuna Set), she painted on canvases prepared years earlier by Douglass Howell, the accomplished papermaker, who built thick, highly textured surfaces from mixtures of gesso, gelatin, and paper; half of them painted over previously existing paintings.” [26] In a general way they alluded to planetary atmospheres and topographies, and were often monochromatic.

Such assumptions skew how we look at art.”[27] Wayne further innovated in the painting medium with her "Quake Series" created between 1992–95, exploring the seismic events so much a part of Southern California life.

Wayne devised her own "highly textured surfaces from styrene modules used for packing shipping crates, the ubiquitous styrofoam “peanut”.

They also continued her tradition of using the most commonplace objects to achieve uncommon aesthetic effects.” Similar materials were used by Wayne in later canvases, including in “Propellar”, the monumental canvas she was working on until her death in 2011.

Wayne conceived and taught a series of professionalization seminars entitled "Joan of Art" to young women artists beginning around 1971.

[30] Wayne's seminars covered various topics related to being a professional artist, such as pricing work and approaching galleries,[31] and involved role-playing and discussion sessions.

After Joseph McCarthy was reelected to the US Senate in 1952, the Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution by a vote of 13-1 calling modern artists “unwitting tools of the Kremlin”.

[60] In 1999 at the time of her retrospective at LACMA Wayne was honored by the Los Angeles City Council with the official proclamation initiated and sponsored by then Councilman Joel Wachs.