Carol Benioff, is a native San Franciscan, whose work explores the emotional effects of societal pressures and upheavals on the human form and environment. She eases the viewer into the darker mysteries behind these representations, one picture at a time.
Her education as an artist has not followed a traditional route. She began her artistic journey at 15, when she participated in a weekly workshop for high school students taught by the artist Ronald Chase. The workshop lasted three years. From Chase she learned how to develop a daily art practice, to pay attention to her process, to look, copy and learn from other artists; and, most importantly she learned how to persevere. After her freshman year in high school, she attended a summer workshop taught by Jay Defeo at the San Francisco Art Institute. Benioff went on to study at the California College of Arts and Crafts; with the printmaker Edward McCluney Junior in Boston; with Elizabeth Murray in a master class at the San Francisco Art Institute; with Robert Flynn Johnson in his class The Greatest Hit of the Achenbach Graphic Arts Council; and with the master printer Karen Tossaivanen at Limestone Press in San Francisco.
In 1993, Benioff was an artist in residence at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. She was awarded the James D. Phelan award in Printmaking in 1995; and in 1996 she was awarded a fellowship at the Kala Art Institute.
Articles and reviews of Benioff’s work have appeared in Print Magazine and ArtWeek.
Benioff’s work is included the catalogs Prints without Borders 2003, Bay Area Women Artists Legacy Project 2020, Bay Area Women Artists Legacy Project The Seventies, Bay Area Women Artists Legacy Project The Eighties, and Carol Benioff Etchings 1993-2020.