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Shoshanah Dubiner is an "almost native" San Francisco artist and designer whose creativity has found expression in a wide range of disciplines. The daughter of middle-class Russian Jewish immigrants in Cleveland, Shoshanah grew up in a home filled with music and art books and began drawing and painting before kindergarten. Her parents encouraged her artistic talents, driving her every Saturday morning to free, public art classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The family moved to San Francisco in 1955 (the beginning of the Beat Era). Soon after she met Jane Kastner, an artist and Curator of Education at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, who invited her to join the (again free) Saturday adult painting classes at the Legion and who became Shoshanah's mentor and life-long friend. During high school Shoshanah became close to the family of Herb Blau and Beatrice Manley, founders of the experimental Actors' Workshop theater company, and spent many after-school hours painting scenery, making costumes, and acting as wardrobe mistress for various avant-garde plays. Although Shoshanah studied drawing and painting throughout high school and college, family pressures to become an academic resulted in her receiving a B.A. from UC Berkeley and a M.A. from Harvard University, both in Comparative Literature. She soon followed her passion for the visual and performing arts by going to Brandeis University's Theatre Department and earning an M.F.A. in Theater Design. She then moved to Rome, Italy, and worked as a costume designer for the Italian stage and cinema from 1968-1971. In Italy, she became active in the women's movement and began to develop her life-long interest in women's issues. Returning to the United States in 1972, Shoshanah established a successful career as a graphic designer, museum exhibition designer, illustrator, and animator, working for the California Academy of Sciences, The Burdick Group, and West Office Designs in San Francisco, and the design studios of Deborah Sussman and Howard Lathrop in Los Angeles, until she started her own computer graphics design firm, The Interactive Muse. In 1983, she designed an interactive videodisc program about symmetry in art and nature, and thus began her 27-year-long study of patterns in nature — spirals, waves, branchings, spheres, and fractals — which resulted in numerous drawings and paintings as well as slide lectures that she presented to groups of students, artists, scientists, and the general public. In 1994, Shoshanah moved to the Sierra foothills. There, she taught handwork and art in a Waldorf school, began a Buddhist meditation practice, and discovered "process painting" as described in the book *Life, Paint and Passion: Reclaiming the Magic of Spontaneous Expression,* by Michelle Cassou and Stewart Cubley. Process painting — painting simply to experience the creative process, the essential life force, not to produce a final product that must be explained, analyzed, evaluated — was a totally revolutionary and exhilarating practice to her. After returning to San Francisco in 2000, she continued to paint at the Center for Creative Expression, developing her unique intuitive mode of expression. In 2003 she had a one-person show, "Infinite Worlds Within," at the Canessa Gallery in San Francisco, and in 2004 she was invited to exhibit at the "Awe to Action" conference sponsored by the Council on Spiritual Practices. Since moving to Ashland, Oregon, in 2004 she has exhibited at the Gallery DeForest ("Miracle of Connecting" 2005) and at Pangea Grills and Wraps ("Dancers" 2005, and "Dancing Scissors" and "Dancing Brush" 2006). She also curated and organized an exhibition of Ashland Middle School students' artwork at Gallery DeForest entitled "Young Talent of Ashland". In 2008, Shoshanah was an invited presenter at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Pacific Division's annual meeting, where she gave an illustrated lecture entitled "Science and Art: A Happy Symbiosis." The same year, she exhibited with molecular and cellular biologist , Dr. Neil Mendelson, in "Two Visions of Nature." She was one of 16 artists selected for the Jefferson Nature Center's series of exhbitions about climate change, "Shifting Patterns: Preparing for Unsettled Days." Currently, she is working on paintings inspired by nature and science, especially cell biology, at her Studio Viva, in the Ashland Art Center at 357 E. Main in Ashland. A resumé listing personal artwork exhibitions and awards, and accomplishments in computer graphics, exhibition design, costume design, and illustration is available by request. |
