Joyce M. Christian is first and foremost an educator. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Education
and a Master of Arts in Curriculum Development and Supervision from the University of Alabama
at Tuscaloosa. She enjoyed a thirty year career with the Department of Defense Education Activity
(DoDEA). She lived and worked in Germany for twenty-three years and completed her career with
the DoDEA at the United States Military Academy at West Point in New York from 2001until
her retirement in 2009.
In 1998 she began communicating with Dennis and Cindy Thompson, the Co-Founders of the
Gypsy Vanner Horse Society. Ms. Christian's work with the horse and on behalf of the breed
registry has been nonstop since that moment in time. In the early years after returning to the
states she became a prolific writer for the registry with articles appearing in Equine Journal, Just
Horses, American Livestock Magazine, and she has been quoted in Horse Illustrated. She is also
the Founding Editor of The Vanner magazine, the official publication for the Gypsy Vanner Horse
Society.
Over the course of the last thirty years Ms. Christian's passion for this horse has driven her to
research, record, and present her findings not only as a recognized author and breed historian, but
as a presenter about the Gypsy Vanner Horse. In addition to speaking at several events in the USA,
in 2018 she was invited to Bogota, Colombia and presented a breed development seminar. She
was then invited to return in 2019 to Medellin, Colombia to present at their Agricultural Expo.
In the last ten years she has been very active on social media, especially via Facebook. She shares
her thoughts, takes her followers back to wonderful moments in the history of these horses, and
is unashamedly blunt in expressing her fear of the breed's threatened future. She signs her posts,
"The Gypsy Vanner Lady". Her overarching goal remains to continue the legacy begun by Cindy
Thompson seeing it through to its greatest potential: the Gypsy Vanner Horse understood,
recognized and applauded as a standardized breed worldwide.
