A longtime resident of Saugerties, in Upstate New York, Josepha Gutelius has had a multi-faceted career as an award-winning playwright, poet, and short-story writer. She studied art in her youth, but it was only at the age of 62 that she returned to painting full-time. Many of her paintings reflect the narrative equivalent of a setting, a sociopolitical viewpoint, and with “characters” who have secrets they’re reluctant to tell. Her realistic detailing is often off-set by abstracted layering, with shifting perspectives, visual puns, and autobiographical references. Her family members, memories, travels, home life, art history, current events, and surroundings are all drawn upon in her work. Her exhibitions include Mohawk-Hudson Regional, Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany Center, Emerge Gallery, Site: Brooklyn, Opus 40 ,WAAM, First Street Gallery NYC, Barrett Art Center, Kingston Annual, the Center for Contemporary Art, among others. Her painting series “The Silence of Nowhere” was awarded a generous grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and her series “Inhabiting New Earth” was the subject of a discussion and interview on Yale University Radio. Earlier in her career, Josepha lived in West Berlin and worked as cultural correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, where she championed the new wave of post-Expressionism; she wrote art criticism for Berliner Blaetter and forewords to artists‘ catalogues, and was a member of the now-legendary Berliner Maler Poeten, (Painters/ Poets). She studied at the Art Students League and graduated from the Masters School, where she studied under painter Robert Arner, who became a lifelong friend and mentor and attended Bard College as an art major and switched to Comparative Literature, eventually concentrating on German literature at Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich. Appropriately enough, she met her future husband in Cadaques, Spain, at the home of Salvador Dali in 1971. Instagram @josephagutelius Selected published writings: https://josephagutelius.comPublished plays: http://proplay.ws/miraclemile.html,http://proplay.ws/veronicacory.html,http://www.stage[plays.com/products/age_of_anxietycategorycyberpresscode629