Rogers Park Artist Lea Pinsky

Lea Pinsky is a painter, muralist, arts educator, and former actress. Raised in Evanston by artist Joanna Pinsky (and mathematician father Mark!), she grew up making art but pursued theatre for most of her twenties, earning her BFA at NYU and acting on Broadway in the 1998 Tony-award winning A View From the Bridge. Returning to Chicago in 1999 to pursue her MA in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, she gradually transitioned from performing back to painting and began a fruitful career in youth arts education program management. She has founded, directed, and taught summer and after school programs with the City of Evanston Cultural Arts Division, the Chicago Humanities Festival, After School Matters, Art Encounter (founded by mom!), Columbia College Chicago Center for Community Arts Partnerships (CCAP), and currently Urban Gateways. She is engaged to artist and collaborator Dustin Harris, with whom she leads community mural projects and curates art shows with their emerging collective, Boombox.

About her work, she says, “I see the world through an actor’s perspective, and carry that sense of performance into the canvases I paint. I am interested in the intersection between character and environment, and the hidden meanings behind faces and quotations. As for my current preoccupation with Wonder Woman as a central character—- I guess that Wonder Woman speaks to my interest in representing the American Every Woman, and also is a playful way to position myself in the work.” See http://www.leapinsky.com for more art.

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