A resident of New York City, Susan Hauptman earned her B.F.A from the University of Michigan and her M.F.A. from Wayne State University in Detroit. Throughout her career, she has worked only on paper and only in charcoal and pastel, portraying her trademark self-portraits and still-lifes with a level of realism that is nearly trompe l’oeil.

Her deftly executed, life-size charcoal self-portraits depict the artist with near-photographic exactitude, staring directly and enigmatically at her viewers while symbolically surrounded by the landscapes of her real and imagined lives. Drawn with complete candor and sparing no wrinkle or blemish, the stark self-portraits toy with gender roles, presenting an androgynous-looking Hauptman and challenging notions of feminine beauty. These works, Hauptman’s most celebrated subject matter for the past twenty years, display not only her technical mastery but also serve as the artist’s own means of self-revelation and reinvention.

Hauptman has had solo shows at Forum Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA; Tatistcheff Gallery, New York, NY; and Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Group exhibitions have included shows at Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, Old Lyme, CT; Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Seraphin Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Gescheidle Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Laguna College of Art and Design, Laguna Beach, CA.

Hauptman’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR; and Norton Gallery of Art, Palm Beach, FL.

She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and held the Lamar-Dodd Professorial Chair at the University of Georgia from 1997-2000. She has been a visiting artist at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; University of California at Santa Barbara; San Francisco Art Institute, CA; and Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY.