Susan Rankaitis

Susan Rankaitis was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and grew up in Natick, Massachusetts and the south side of Chicago. She began her professional life as a painter and art director/research assistant at the Plato Laboratory (Computer Based Education Research) at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Since that time, ideas from the sciences have continued to enter into the realm of her art practice. While her training and primary areas of expertise are painting, drawing and analog photography, her artworks are most often defined as experimental photography or combined media. Since 1977 when she received her MFA her work has been included in over 100 museum exhibitions in the US, Europe and Asia. She has received three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Flintridge Foundation Award in the Visual Arts as well as fellowships from the Avery, Borchard, Djerassi, Mellon and Graves Foundations. Ms. Rankaitis has been involved in collaborative projects with neuroscientist David Somers, dancer/choreographer John Pennington, biologist Robert Sinsheimer, poet Amy M. Wai Man and the later writer Paul Monette. The Robert Mann Gallery in New York represents her work and she holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Studio Art at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Ms. Rankaitis works out of a studio in Upland, California that she shares with photographer Robbert Flick.