KATE SPENCER
 

Kate Spencer is a natural history illustrator specializing in marine mammals, tunas, and reptiles and amphibians. She began studying cetaceans in 1987 as a teenage volunteer numbering dolphin bones in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History basement "bone room" for Jim Mead, Curator of Marine Mammals. A few years later she returned to the Smithsonian with an honors degree in biology and studio art from Smith College, Massachusetts. During her 1993 internship in scientific illustration in the Division of Amphibians and Reptiles, she also flensed dolphin heads for the mammal collection.

The next several years at the Smithsonian brought a variety of projects, from the reference volume "Biology of Tadpoles" to painting tunas for the "Mighty Marlin" exhibit to working at Carrie Bow Cay coral reef field station in Belize. She kept up mammalian studies by illustrating blue whales and minke skulls with Jim Mead and taking advanced human anatomy drawing at the Washington Studio School.

Kate was staff illustrator for the Smithsonian Department of Anthropology's Handbook of North American Indians in 1998 before taking a sabbatical from illustration to tackle local conservation issues. She founded and directed a grassroots watershed protection group in suburban Maryland and wrote articles for local conservation publications.

Fascination with tunas brought her back into marine illustration with an Artistic Residency at the Tuna Research and Conservation in Pacific Grove, California, in 2000. She finally met live whales on whale watches with Nancy Black out on Monterey Bay. At the 2000 ACS meeting in Monterey she met Pieter Folkens who invited her to become a Research Associate with the Alaska Whale Foundation. Kate spent the summer of 2001 in southeast Alaska studying humpbacks up close on the Foundation's R/V Evolution, and working as a naturalist on a Princess cruise ship. At the end of the summer she stepped off the ship in San Francisco and permanently migrated to Monterey/Pacific Grove, where she can see both whales and tunas year round. Kate now illustrates and paints marine life full time, and follows the whales to Alaska in the summer.

Kate has had four solo shows of paintings and illustrations in the Washington, D.C. area. An exhibit of her landscape watercolors and nature studies is currently showing in Carmel, California. Visit Kate's website