Moira Hahn - Biography

I've exhibited my fine art throughout the US, with a few shows in Japan and Canada, for over two decades.

In Asian art, I'm inspired by Persian miniatures, Tibetan Thanka paintings, Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, Indian animal drawings and Chinese guardian figures. In Western art, the documentary art of Explorer/ Scientist painters including Martin Johnson Heade, John James Audobon and Karl Bodmer has informed my work. I've traveled all over the Southwest to study petroglyphs, pictographs and Native American visual culture.

Contemporary artists I admire include Hilary Brace, Henry Darger, Daniel Du Plessis, Tim Hawkinson, Jess, William Kentridge, Tom Knechtel, Sarah Perry, Ken Price, Hisashi Tenmyouya and Thomas Woodruff.

My BFA in Drawing and Painting was conferred by the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), in Baltimore, Maryland, through which I took advantage of a mobility program to attend California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland, California. I later studied printmaking at Otis Art Institute, and other art curricula at California State University, Fullerton, where I earned an MFA in 2000.

In my 20s, I studied experimental animation at CalArts, in Valencia, CA, with Jules Engel, and later worked in the animation industry and illustrated books and magazines for The Pushpin Group, an artists' agency in New York. I studied Japanese art in Hawaii and Japan for several years in the 1980s, and later taught studio art at colleges and universities in Southern California.

I am descended from artists on both sides of the family. My dad's parents met in a landscape painting class in upstate New York. So although they had named me for a British ballerina, my parents didn't discourage me from pursuing an interest in drawing from an early age.