List of Famous people named Joan

Joan Beverly Kroc, also known as Joni, was an American philanthropist and third wife of McDonald's CEO Ray Kroc.

Joan Didion is an American writer who launched her career in the 1960s after winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Didion's writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s and the Hollywood lifestyle. Her political writing often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography for The Year of Magical Thinking. She later adapted the book into a play, which premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2017, Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne.

Virginia Joan Kennedy is an American socialite, musician, author, and former model. She was the first wife of U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy.

Joan à Beckett Lindsay, also known as Lady Lindsay, was an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and visual artist. Trained in her youth as a painter, Lindsay published her first literary work in 1936 at age forty under a pseudonym, a satirical novel titled Through Darkest Pondelayo. Her second novel, Time Without Clocks, was published nearly thirty years later, and was a semi-autobiographical account of the early years of her marriage to artist Daryl Lindsay.

Joan Laporta Estruch is a Spanish politician and current president of FC Barcelona.

Joan Anita Barbara Armatrading, is a British singer-songwriter and guitarist.

Joan Delano Aiken was an English writer specialising in supernatural fiction and children's alternative history novels. In 1999 she was awarded an MBE for her services to children's literature. For The Whispering Mountain, published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers, and she was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British writer. She won an Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972) for Night Fall.

Joan Ann Olivier, Baroness Olivier, DBE, commonly known as Dame Joan Plowright, is a retired English actress whose career has spanned over seven decades. She has won two Golden Globe Awards and a Tony Award and has been nominated for an Academy Award, an Emmy and two BAFTA Awards. She was the second of only four actresses to have won two Golden Globes in the same year.

Joan Allen is an American actress. She began her career with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 1977, won the 1984 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play for And a Nightingale Sang, and won the 1988 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her Broadway debut in Burn This. She is also a three-time Academy Award nominee, receiving Best Supporting Actress nominations for Nixon (1995) and The Crucible (1996), and a Best Actress nomination for The Contender (2000).

Joan Murray is an American bank executive and former skydiver who was severely injured during a parachute landing and was subsequently bitten over 200 times by fire ants. She shared an account of her experience with People Magazine. The article by People claims "Her doctors think the stings may have shocked her heart enough to keep it beating", however no other public evidence for this claim has been presented besides the article by People.