Biography

Allison Beckwith Cooke was born in Midwest City, Oklahoma in 1954. She spent most of her childhood living on the East Coast before moving to Wisconsin in 1970. She earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Art Education from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1976 and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Drawing and Painting from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee in 1988.

Since 1985, Allison has taught drawing and painting studio classes at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and in the Department of Visual Art housed in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In the summer of 2007, Allison taught an On-Site Drawing class at the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy. She will be returning there in the summer of 2008 to teach a course on the Materials and Methods of the Renaissance – focusing on egg tempera painting.

Allison's passion for the ancient and classical imagery that inspires her artwork has been enhanced by her travels to Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Russia, and Sweden. Her images are created in both traditional and experimental media and techniques in painting and print-making. Her most recent studio explorations include the ancient mediums of egg tempera and encaustic.