Michelle Vezina Peterlin
Artist Bio
Michelle Vezina Peterlin is an American Artist. She was born in Gardner, Massachusetts. She is the second generation to be born in America on her maternal side. Her artistic ability expressed itself around the age of 5. Her parents had the foresight to enroll her in private art lessons. She spent her youth receiving training from the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts. She received her bachelor's degree in painting from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. At UMASS, she was fortunate to study under known master painters John Grillo and Leonel Gongora.
She spent the first 10 years of her career as an art curator at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Historic New Harmony (Indiana), and the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art. In 1993, she and her husband relocated to Southern Indiana. In 1996, she made the decision to leave the curator field to raise her children with her husband and paint full-time.
She is currently an adjunct painting professor at the University of Evansville. She is an elected member of the Rhode Island Art League. She is a member of the National Acrylic & Oil Painters Society. She is the Art director and board member of the New Harmony Artists' Guild.
Her most recent work has evolved around being Jewish and a woman in a world of conflict. Many of the models are her daughters and she records their dreams and aspirations. Her compositions have to do with peace, war, conflict, folklore, and universal symbols for peace, conflict, good, and evil.