Scroll down for my bio and CV, or go to more info to learn more about recent and upcoming exhibitions, collecting my work, press, social media and contact info.

I am a visual artist who started as a painter. My practice is about stories. I'm interested in our relationship to animals and to the power structures that define our lives. I use images and text, whether that means making books, paintings with narratives or text or using printmaking and virtual reality to make interactive artworks. I recently completed a 15 month residency with Pollinator Gallery, where I learned printmaking and made an edition of an artist book, Running, Artmaking and Mothering along the Schuykill River in Philadelphia (left). The book and prints that I made during the residency were in an exhibition in 2025 called Printing Home. Pollinator also produced a small monograph about my book project through their press, Seaweed Salad Editions, that is available at the gallery. World in Progress is an interactive virtual reality piece that is based on the paintings in the Saga Series. It is an evolving project that explores what it means to have an emotional experience within an artwork and how the handmade can work in an intagible medium like VR. I'm currently working on a new version of the project that I expect to complete by 2026. My painting Reversal was part of The Art Show, an exhibition curated by Craig Stover at the Hicks Gallery at Bucks County Community College in 2025. Craig Stover interviewed me for his wonderful series of conversations with contemporary artists, ArtShow. My segment is below. I post in-progress clips of the VR project and my ongoing work on Instagram. You can take a look at a short video clip of an early prototype here. A group of large paintings on paper called the Saga Series was shown at the Rosewood Gallery in the Kettering Art Centre in Kettering, OH. The gallery made a really nice video about the show that you can see on Facebook here. I also posted a short artists’ talk on Instagram which you can see here. Saga 2 was included in My American Experience, an online exhibition curated by Lauren Palmor, the Assistant Curator of American Art at the de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The show was put together by the O'Hanlon Center for the Arts in Mill Valley, CA. There was an Artist's Roundtable event on Zoom on March 9th that is available on their Vimeo page. Another artists' book, Fred Petersen, CEO in Nature was included in A Watched Pot Always Boils at Umpqua Valley Arts in Roseburg, Oregon. The book is also available on my studio storefront along with Still Still, I Mean it After All, a larger book of paintings.

Bio

Samantha Simpson makes interactive VR, books and work on paper. She has a long history of painting on paper but is now making prints and immersive painted worlds in VR. Her work asks questions about empathy, artmaking and politics within the frame of a theatrical vision of the natural world. Simpson’s work has been shown nationally and internationally, and has been included in solo and two-person exhibitions at Pollinator Gallery, the Rosewood Art Gallery, Firehouse Art Center, Firecat Projects; Gallery Joe; Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center; Tufts University; the Lawndale Art Center in Houston; Slugfest Printmaking Workshop in Austin, Texas and Gallerie Michael Rasche in Fribourg, Germany. Her art has been included in group exhibitions at the Atlanta Contemporary Museum; Moti Hasson Gallery; Gallery Joe; the Cornell Museum of Art; New Langton Arts; Southern Exposure; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Gallerie Magda Danysz in Paris, France, among others. Her work can be found in the private and public collections of the Sackner Archive of Visual Poetry, the DiRosa Foundation Collection and the collections at Wesleyan and Cornell University galleries. She is the recipient of grants from the Leeway Foundation and Temple University and was a finalist for a Pew Fellowship. She has attended residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts and the Headlands Center for the Arts and teaches at Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia.

Selected Press

Feige, Jacob, “Drawing Now”, October 20, 2014
Schwartz, Chip, “Drawn Together in Philadelphia,” Knight Arts, September 9, 2014
Newhall, Edith, “Ballpoint Pen Drawings with Wit and Charm,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 16, 2008
Fallon, Roberta, “Silhouettes and Drawings Rule the New School,” Philadelphia Weekly, May 14, 2008
Newhall, Edith, “Drawings that Dot the 'I' in Ink,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 20, 2007
Hill, Lori, “First Friday Focus,” Philadelphia Citypaper, July 5, 2007
Fallon, Roberta, “Ink!,” Philadelphia Weekly, July 18, 2007
Fallon, Roberta, “Ink at Gallery Joe,” Artblog, July 18, 2007
Johnson, Ken, “I Woke Up in a Strange Place,” New York Times, January 13, 2006
Newhall, Edith, “The Surreal to the Allegorical,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 23, 2005
Fallon, Roberta, “Editor’s Pick,” Philadelphia Weekly, December 21, 2005
“Animal Fables,” Ed Sosanski, Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 2004
“Local Muses,” Roberta Fallon, Philadelphia Weekly, November 3, 2004
“New Releases and Paradise, Photographs by Lily Frisco,” Roberta Fallon, Philadelphia Weekly, August 4, 2004
“From the Artist's Mouth,” Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosoff's Artblog, August 12, 2004
“First Friday ups and Downs,” Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosoff's Artblog, August 8, 2004
“First Friday Fireworks,” Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosoff's Artblog, July 5, 2004
“Lines Dance,” Roberta Fallon, Philadelphia Weekly, February 12, 2003
“Cartoon Confrontations, Samantha Simpson's 'The Snake Cycle' at Hallwalls,” Mark Lavatelli, ArtVoice, June 20–26, 2002
“Fantasies and Nightmares,” Cathy Byrd, Creative Loafing, April 11, 2001
“Samantha Simpson's Snake Cycle,” John Massier, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, 2002
“The Greatest Shows in Town,” Steve Mitchell, ArtVoice, June 13, 2002
“When the Wind Blows: 2001 Atlanta Biennial,” Stephanie Bowman, Art Papers, September 2001
“Biennial’s Big ‘Wind’ Has Small Substance,” Catherine Fox, Atlanta Journal Constitution, April 20, 2001
“When the Wind Blows: 2001 Atlanta Biennial,” Catalog essay, Teresa Bramlette
“Bizarro World: The Parallel Universes of Comics & Fine Arts,” Ron Abrams, Catalog Essay, Cornell Museum, 2000
“Double Vision,” Steve Schneider, Orlando Weekly, March 16–22, 2000
“Wake up and hear, see and feel the difference,” Laura Stewart, Daytona News Journal, December 12, 1999
“Art & Technology at the Ormond Art Museum,” Carla Brooke, Flagler-Palm Coast Community Times, December 29, 1999
“Airbrush, Kegel und Selbstporträt,” Badische Zeitung, May 22, 1999
“Samantha Simpson,” Pat Benson, Leonardo, February 1997
“Big Jesus Trash Can,” Harry Roche, San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 8–14, 1995
“The New Renaissance of San Francisco Dealers,” Jeffrey Bernstein, Art West, January 1995
“Drawing First,” Harry Roche, San Francisco Bay Guardian, December 1, 1993
“Pop Pix, Prehistoric at the Victoria Room,” Robert Friedman, Artweek, October 21, 1993
“Inviting Art at an Uninviting Location,” Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle, September 27, 1993

2024-25 Philadelphia Artist in Residence, Pollinator Gallery, Philadelphia PA
2002 Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, NY
1998 Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL — Writing Art Criticism: Affiliate Artist with Carter Ratcliff
1995–1997 Headlands Center for the Arts: Affiliate Artist

MFA Painting, 1993, San Francisco Art Institute
BFA, 1990, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Austin Conkey, San Francisco, CA
Ann Newman, Williamsville, NY
Astrid Bowlby, Philadelphia, PA
Becky Kerlin, Philadelphia, PA
Barbara Hammar, New York, NY
Michelle Rollman, New York, NY
Rene & Veronica DiRosa Foundation, Napa, CA
Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University
Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University

2006–present Associate Professor, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
2000–2006 Assistant Professor, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
1997–1999 Assistant Professor, Digital Media Program, Art Department, Stetson University, Deland, FL
1996 Professor, Savannah College of Art & Design, Savannah, GA

Visiting Lectures

2000 Visiting Speaker, Cornell Museum of Art, Orlando, FL
1998 Visiting Faculty, Artists Critique Workshop, Ormond Museum of Art, Ormond, FL
1996 Visiting Artist Lecture, Memphis College of Art
1992 Artist's Lecture, Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA
1996 Artist Lecture Series, Headlands Center for the Arts