Biography

Originally from Denver, Colorado, Andra Samelson currently lives and works in New York City. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College and is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Samelson’s work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe and her public artwork, commissioned by New Jersey Transit, is permanently on view at the Hudson Bergen Light Rail’s Second Street Station in Hoboken, NJ. She has been a visiting artist at the University of Virginia, Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, and the ceramics factory Ditta Grazia Majoliche Artistiche in Deruta, Italy. Her work has been reproduced and reviewed in the New York Times, Art Forum, New York Arts, New American Painting and elsewhere, and is represented in several private and public collections including the Rubin Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, Chase Manhattan Bank, Dow Jones, and the Loyola University Museum of Art. A recurrent theme in Samelson’s work is the relationship of microcosm and macrocosm, the celestial and terrestrial. The imagery in her paintings is often associated with molecular and galactic systems. She often works with circular imagery, referencing both metaphysical concepts and circular forms in nature from the microcosm of the cell to the macrocosm of the starry universe.