About
Katha Seidman builds stories that connect the past to the present. Sometimes solo, often in collaboration with other artists, these works express the mysteries of time, individual lives, social ritual and art.
Biography
Katha spent her early childhood on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound, where she learned to appreciate the complexity of nature, especially the different moods of the sea.
At the age of nine, Katha’s family moved to Ghana, where she lived for the next four years. During that time she traveled to twenty-three countries in Europe, Asia and West Africa.
After graduating with a BA from Goddard College in Vermont, Seidman spent the next twelve years living in the woods of New Hampshire and Vermont reworking over one hundred paintings. Each was a portrait painted from memory. She rarely let anyone see them.
When she moved to the Boston area she threw most of those paintings away. She graduated with a diploma in Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1991 Seidman received her MFA in painting from Bard College.
In 1993, she began designing sets for television productions. She has been nominated for five Emmys and received three Emmy Awards for Outstanding Achievement: Scenic Design.
In her paintings as well as in her film and television design, Seidman creates narratives that explore her responses to her environment. In her television work she studies time periods that, like the foreign places she visits, expand her understanding of human narratives. She delights in disorientation. Seidman uses her past experiences to find images that help organize the confusion of the present.