Kathryn Jacobi is a classically trained, contemporary realist painter and printmaker who has been working professionally for over 40 years, exhibiting in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Over her life as an artist, she has always worked on two consecutive bodies of paintings that are distinct and separate from eachother. The first group is from direct observation or based on old photographs and relates to her experience of the world. The second group derives from her imagination, the paintings collectively weaving a narrative of her inner life and its journeys. Over the past few years, she has also become more and more intrigued with the creative possibilities for making images inherent in digital photography and the computer darkroom, and now considers this a third avenue of practice and exploration.

Kathryn was born in Manhattan in 1947. Her father was a writer, her mother is still a portrait painter, her one brother is a teacher, and her husband, Richard Dysart, is an actor. She has one son, Arie Wolf Jacobi, who is an accomplished sculptor and inventor. She attended UCLA, UCBerkeley, and California State University Northridge where she received her BA in 1978 and her MA in 1980. While Kathryn has spent much of her life in California (she presently lives in Santa Monica and has a studio in Los Angeles) she has also spent much of the past 2 decades in the forests of British Columbia where she had a second home and studios.