Joan Severance was born on December 23, 1958. She is an American actress and former fashion model. Her family moved often while she was growing up. The family had to leave Libya during the Six Day War in 1967. They moved back to Houston where she attended Westbury High School and, at the age of 15, started modeling to make money for university. Her ambition was to become a veterinarian although she failed to make enough money for tuition. She was then hired by the Elite modeling agency which allowed her to travel again. In Paris, in 1977, she married Eric Milan. They divorced in 1984.

In the late 1980s Severance used her modeling success to start an acting career, making her debut in a small role in the first Lethal Weapon film in 1987. Severance usually takes the femme fatale roles in lower budget horror and murder mystery movies, most notably Lake Consequence (1993), Criminal Passion (1994) and Payback (1995). She memorably featured alongside Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in the 1989 comedy See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and as Hulk Hogan's love interest, Samantha N. Moore, in the wrestling film No Holds Barred (1989). She had leading roles in Roger Corman's Black Scorpion (1995) (she later starred in and co-produced a sequel, Black Scorpion II: Aftershock (1997)), and The Last Seduction 2 (1999).

Joan's most notable role is as a villainess on the TV series Wiseguy, where she played half of a brother/sister crime team (the other half was played by Kevin Spacey) to great acclaim. Their partnership was reprised in See No Evil, Hear No Evil.

Severance was on the covers of the January 1990 and November 1992 issues of Playboy magazine, both featuring her in a nude pictorial. Her pictures are considered some of the most distinctive examples of nude modeling of the actresses of her generation.

In the early 1990s, Severance appeared as Samantha "Sam" Dooley, the Martian Belle, in several training videos for Virtual World Entertainment alongside other actors such as Cheech Marin, "Weird Al" Yankovic, R. Lee Ermey and Judge Reinhold.