Zoe Schein interview
Learn more about Zoe Schein in an interview for Pearl.
Zoe Schein is a teaching artist and freelance illustrator originally from Urbana, Illinois. As a teacher, Zoe leads classes for all ages in non-traditional educational settings, focusing on drawing, making comics, and 2D design. As an illustrator, Zoe’s focus is on educational comics: their book of short comics stories, Clinical Ethics: A Graphic Medicine Casebook, was published by Penn State University Press in 2022. Their next book, Love Is Learned: A Choose-Your-Own Relationship Adventure, with the One Love Foundation, is forthcoming. Zoe also recently created a commissioned artwork for the Boston Children’s Museum.
For their own art, Zoe works in cut paper, pen and ink, and other media, taking inspiration from things that delight them: food, nature, anatomy, art history, poetry, teaching, children’s artworks, and the places they feel at home.
Zoe earned their MA in Art Education from RISD in 2017 and their BA in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies from Grinnell College in 2012.
Artist Statement
It’s hard to overstate the closeness of the relationship between my art and teaching practices. Teaching brought me to the medium of cut paper, and my collages embody a central tension of teaching art: the balance of discipline, craft, and history against personal style, expression, and individuation. A favorite art teacher of mine once told me, “Artists are problem-solvers; we just create our own problems.” Cut paper collage offers a set of art problems I am eager and energized to solve: a world to play inside whose limitations somehow expand possibility rather than restricting it. I relish the ways the limited color palette and the simplified line-and-shape relationships allow me to puzzle works together and bounce freely between processes of design and execution. This body of work prompts me to take my own advice and build an art practice that exercises the parts of myself that I value most: curiosity, exuberance, deliberateness, and delight.
Instagram: @zoe_schein_art
Personal website
images of work
