Jennifer Balkan

Although Jennifer had drawn all her life, she didn't embrace her passion to paint until 2001. She studied behavioral neuroscience at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, then worked serving the mentally ill and developmentally disabled population in Seattle.She was pulled to Austin to study Latin American sociology at the University of Texas, and attained her Ph.D. in 2001 after conducting anthropological fieldwork on human migration in Chiapas, Mexico in 1999. Although Jennifer's experience in Mexico was rich, she longed for artistic creativity. In 2002, she quit her full-time job doing social scientific research and threw herself into oil painting and now paints fervently. She also teaches painting and drawing to adults and teens.

She writes "I now realize that my time studying the human psyche both psychologically and sociologically must have left its imprint on my brain permanently...because I cannot seem to stray too far from it in my painting."

Jennifer is in New American Paintings, vol. 72, available in bookstores around the country.
www.newamericanpaintings.com

web site: www.jenniferbalkan.net

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