Rachel Simmons/Bio

Simmons grew up in Port Tampa and Bradenton, two communities located in the Tampa Bay Area. She attended Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida completing an Honors degree in studio art in 1997 where she studied printmaking and painting at Rollins under Bosnian artist Tanja Softic. After graduating, she left for Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she completed an MFA under the guidance of painters Michael Crespo and Edward Pramuk at Louisiana State University. In 2000, Rachel returned to her alma mater Rollins College as a professor of studio art. At Rollins, she has been actively involved in connecting the studio arts curriculum to the local community through specialized service-learning courses and collaborative art projects. In 2009, she was granted the Florida Campus Compact Service-Learning Faculty Award for the State of Florida. That same year, Rachel journeyed to Antarctica for the second time to make work about climate change and ecotourism. Rachel is in her 12th year of teaching at Rollins.

In the last few years, Rachel’s work has been exhibited in Florida at the Orlando Museum of Art, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum in Winter Park and the Arts Center in St. Petersburg, in New York at the Ceres Gallery and the Broadway Gallery as well as abroad in Piacenza, Italy at the Pulcheria Arte exhibition of international women artists and at the 2005 Florence Biennale. Her work was recently on display in Montreal at Galerie Gora.


Rachel’s body of work entitled "Wonders” urges viewers to consider how human activities are negatively impacting the ocean. This work was on exhibit as part of the L.A. Design Center’s group show “stream” and on display as a solo exhibition at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum in 2007 and in 2009 at the Dunedin Fine Art Center. In 2010, Rachel exhibited new work at the Broadway Gallery in New York and Nina Torres Gallery in Miami during “Art Basel”  as part of the United States Biennial Artists Exhibition.  Rachel’s Wonders work will be on display at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.through February of 2012. Be sure to take a look at her most recent project, a collaborative comic on Future Bear. And you can click on the video below to see Rachel’s 2010 Tedx talk about her work.


CV BIO

Artist's Statement

Art Space Talk: Interview with

Rachel Simmons

Bibliography


Contact Information

rsimmons4@mac.com

Studio located at Rollins College

Department of Art and Art History

1000 Holt Ave. #2676

Winter Park, FL 32789

407-646-2397 office


Email to set up a studio visit.


Green Art at Tedx Orlando, 2010

(click on image to the right)