A native of Poughkeepsie NY, Christine received an A.B. in  English from Bryn Mawr College in 1991.  She then moved to downtown Philadelphia to earn a Certificate in Painting and Printmaking from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  There she was awarded a Louis S. Ware Memorial Scholarship for European Travel.  While Artist-in-Residence at the Fleisher Art Memorial from 1997 to 2002, she began teaching and studied at the Barnes Foundation.  In 2003 she moved to Brooklyn NY, where she earned a Master's Degree in Fine Arts at Brooklyn College.  In November 2023, Christine did an Artist Residency at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy. With the exception of 2020 when she sheltered-in-place in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, Christine lives and works in Brooklyn throughout the year and spends summers painting in Maine.

Sarah Griffin Thibodeaux is a contemporary realist artist living in New Orleans.  She studied at the New Orleans Academy of Art, the Art Students League, and Florence Academy of Art. She has taught portrait painting, still life painting, and plein air painting since 2009, both at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, the Capital Hill Arts Workshop (in Washington, D.C.) and in her atelier, Studio Thibodeaux, where she offers digital classes, travel workshops, local workshops, and portrait commissions.

She loves to share the process of alla prima painting--the deliberate application of brush strokes to give the painting the feeling of life, of spontaneity, of the buzzing of life all around us. Sarah is  looking forward to sharing this experience of painting with you.