Bio
Shoshanah Dubiner
Artist, designer and educator, Shoshanah Dubiner grew up in San Francisco during that city’s Renaissance. In high school she met her art teacher and mentor, Jane Kastner, Educational Curator at the SF Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Embarking on her post-secondary education, Dubiner eventually earned degrees in Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley and Harvard, then in Theatre Design at Brandeis University.
In 1971, while living in Italy, she discovered D’Arcy Thompson’s Crescita e Forma (On Growth and Form). Barely understanding the Italian text, she nonetheless could easily ‘read’ the illustrations and understood that there are recurring, geometric, self-assembling forms in nature that can be explained by physics and chemistry.
From 1977 to 1979 she worked as exhibit designer at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, followed by a period of designing interactive computer-and-video-based educational games for Aramco’s Petroleum Science and Technology Museum in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and interactive educational programs for the Minnesota Wildlife Refuge and for the American Heart Association.
From 2000 to 2004, she studied Process Painting with teacher Barbara Kaufman at the Center for Creative Expression in San Francisco. Her first solo exhibition of process paintings, Infinite Worlds Within (2003) was held at the Canessa Gallery in San Francisco.
In 2004, she moved to Ashland, Oregon, to devote herself full-time to the practice of ‘psyche-morpho-graphy,’ the visionary art of depicting the psyche in the language of natural forms. A course in cell biology in 2007 at Southern Oregon University sent her artwork into the world of the tiny while reviving her old passion for patterns in nature.
In November of 2011, while reading Lynn Margulis’ book What Is Life?, she learned of Margulis’ sudden death and was immediately moved to create a painting in her honor. The result was Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis, which later was transformed into a video animation for the exhibition Science Friction (2021) at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.
VIDEO: Shoshanah Dubiner: Life and Work