Suzy Kitman was born Brooklyn and grew up in a Northern New Jersey town that was famous for its artists, musicians and writers. She returned to New York City as an adult and began her career working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a patina artist in the Reproduction Department. There, she became steeped in the museum's massive holdings and became drawn to Italian and Dutch Renaissance painting.
Kitman holds a BA in Studio Art from Kenyon College and an MFA in Painting from The University of Montana. She studied drawing and painting at the Art Students League, New York Academy of Art and National Academy of Design. She specializes in portraiture, landscape and still life. Her current work includes Under, In And Over; A Reflected Water Series, in oil paint, which considers the plane where nature and urban elements merge and become abstract, and the St. Johns, Portland Oregon Series, in oil pastel, which explores an inner city neighborhood on the edge of gentrification and its relationship with the land and old cars.
Kitman has lived and worked in Portland, Oregon since 1997, where she has taught painting and drawing at Portland Community College, the Multnomah Art Center, the Portland Art Museum, Hipbone Studio, and The University of Montana. She also tutors students of all ages in art from her studio in St. Johns and online.
