Of Robert Redford’s three surviving children, only one, his daughter Shauna, chose to stay almost entirely out of public life. Shauna Redford works privately as a painter, has never given an interview, and did not speak publicly even after her father’s death in September 2025.
The one part of her adult life that keeps drawing outside attention has little to do with anything she has done herself. In 1983, her boyfriend at the University of Colorado Boulder, Sid Wells, was shot to death in his apartment. The man police wanted for the killing disappeared three years later and has never been found. That case has never been closed, and it is almost always the reason her name resurfaces, most recently after her father’s death brought new attention back to the family.
Table of Contents
Fast Facts
- Full name: Shauna Jean Redford
- Born: November 15, 1960
- Parents: Robert Redford and Lola Van Wagenen
- Spouse: Eric Schlosser, married October 1985
- Children: Mica and Conor Schlosser
- Occupation: Painter
- Known for: A private life as a painter, and her connection to the unsolved 1983 murder of Sid Wells
Family and Early Life
Shauna Jean Redford was born on November 15, 1960, to Robert Redford and his first wife, Lola Van Wagenen, who married in 1958 and divorced in 1985, as his New York Times obituary states.
She was the second of four children, though she never knew her oldest sibling. Scott Anthony, the first child, died of sudden infant death syndrome at two and a half months old, about a year before Shauna was born. A younger brother, James, went by Jamie, built a career as a documentary filmmaker, and helped their father start the environmental nonprofit The Redford Center in 2005; he died of cancer in 2020, at 58. The youngest, Amy, works in film as an actress and director.
Shauna enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1979 and graduated with a degree in art in 1985, well past when a standard four-year track would have had her finish. Wells had been killed two years earlier, in the middle of what would have been her own college years.
The Murder of Sid Wells
Shauna met Wells, a CU Boulder journalism student, at a Navy ROTC dance on March 7, 1980, during their freshman year. He did not know at the time that she was Robert Redford’s daughter. Boulder Reporting Lab, which interviewed Wells’ mother years later, reported that Redford brought Wells into the family’s life over the next few years, including a trip to New York where he introduced Wells to television journalist Tom Brokaw about a possible job.
On August 1, 1983, Wells was shot to death in his Boulder apartment. His brother, Sam, discovered the body. Some accounts describe him as entering his senior year at the time, though that does not match his known enrollment date of 1979. Redford was in the middle of filming The Natural. His New York Times obituary states that the murder “fed his reclusive tendencies” for years afterward.
Shauna herself was in a serious car accident at some point afterward, one that left her vehicle submerged in water with her still inside. She survived. The New York Times, the only source to report this, does not say when it happened.
The investigation that followed is documented in detail, through court records, news coverage, and the FBI’s own case file:
- Boulder police arrested Wells’ roommate, Thayne Smika, on October 6, 1983.
- The case went before a grand jury on October 24, 1983.
- About a week later, then District Attorney Alex Hunter declined to file charges, citing insufficient evidence, and Smika was released.
- Smika disappeared from the Boulder area in 1986, after his car was found abandoned in Beverly Hills with a stolen license plate.
- On December 2, 2010, Colorado prosecutors issued a new state arrest warrant, followed by a federal warrant on December 13, based on forensic testing of shotgun pellets recovered from the scene.
- The FBI continues to list Smika as wanted for first-degree murder, with a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to his arrest. He has not been found as of July 2026.
June Menger, Wells’ mother, spoke about that period in an interview before she died. She recalled Shauna coming to see her the night of the murder. “We cried together,” Menger said. For the rest of her life, she added, she thought of Shauna as a daughter-in-law, even though the two never had the chance to become family through marriage.
Marriage to Eric Schlosser and Their Children
She married journalist Eric Schlosser that same year, in October 1985, on her parents’ lawn in Provo, Utah, the New York Times reported. Schlosser later became known as the author of Fast Food Nation. He began his career at The Atlantic Monthly, where he won a National Magazine Award in 1994 for an investigative series on marijuana laws.
The couple have two children, a daughter and a son. Anna Michaela “Mica” Redford Schlosser was born in January 1991, and her younger brother, Conor James Redford Schlosser, followed in July 1992, according to Men’s Journal.
Conor has taken a far more public path than his mother. He works as a producer at RadicalMedia and now helps lead The Redford Center. In November 2024, he interviewed his grandfather for Orion Magazine, in a piece called “Keeping Nature in the Picture.” After Robert Redford’s death, Conor posted a tribute on Instagram, calling his grandfather “larger than life to the world” but, to the family, “simply that… family.”
A Painter, Not a Public One
Shauna is identified as a painter by Google Arts & Culture and in her father’s own Wikipedia biography. Past that basic label, there is no public record of a gallery, a dealer, or a single exhibition tied to her name, despite family connections that would have made any of those things simple to arrange.
Her father wanted the same career, decades earlier. His New York Times obituary describes him studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in his early twenties, where he sold sketches on the street to cover rent. “I didn’t want to be an actor,” he told his biographer, Michael Feeney Callan. “I wanted to be Modigliani.” He turned to acting because painting could not support a young family, and the Times reports that he spent much of his career describing Hollywood as incidental to what he actually cared about.
Shauna finished the degree her father never got the chance to pursue. She had every connection required to show her work publicly and, as best anyone has reported, never used a single one of them. Where her brother built a career in documentary film and her son now writes for national magazines while helping run the family’s nonprofit, Shauna works in the one field in the family with no built-in audience at all. Nothing in the public record explains why, and nothing suggests she has ever wanted it explained.
Since Her Father’s Death
Robert Redford died in his sleep on September 16, 2025, at his home in Sundance, Utah, the community where he had founded the Sundance Film Festival decades earlier. He was 89. His publicist, Cindi Berger, gave no specific cause of death. He was buried on his own property after a private funeral, survived by his wife, Sibylle Szaggars, and his daughters, Shauna and Amy.
His death brought new attention to the Wells case for the first time in years. The FBI’s Denver field office renewed its public appeal for information about Smika shortly afterward, and the case remains unresolved as of this writing.
None of that depends on Shauna’s cooperation. The FBI’s file on Smika remains open, the reward has not been withdrawn, and any future news involving her father’s family will likely mention the case again, regardless of what she wants. The one part of her life that has stayed entirely on her own terms, for more than forty years, is a painting practice that has never appeared in a single gallery, dealer listing, or exhibition that anyone has documented.
