Emily Payne

Emily Payne Biography

Emily Payne Description

Emily Payne was born in San Francisco and grew up in Mill Valley, California, and Amherst, Massachusetts. She went to Oberlin College where she studied English and Women’s Studies. Emily moved to San Francisco after college and studied figure drawing and oil painting. Her love of making sculptural things with paper led her to pursue an MFA in printmaking and book arts at San Francisco State University. In the midst of busy, often noisy classrooms, she anchored her concentration with heavy, low-tech but utterly reliable tools like the letterpress, the book press, and a beat-up wooden ceramics table she found abandoned in the corner of the sculpture lab. It became her makeshift studio space.