Bio
Sophia Ainslie is a South African American abstract painter whose work exists somewhere between drawing and painting. She transforms her observations of the world around her into her own abstract visual language that celebrates color, relationships, movement, and space. Her imagery focuses on the connection between diagnostic imaging technologies and landscape, interior and exterior, and the microscopic and macroscopic.
Ainslie grew up in an atmosphere that celebrated creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. Her father, Bill Ainslie, an artist, together with her mother, Fieke, founded the Johannesburg Art Foundation (one of the first multiracial art schools in South Africa).
Under the full sponsorship of her patron Henny Kirshon, and the Art History Department at Tufts, she pursued her MFA in Boston, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University in 2001. After graduating she received the Anne and Graham Gund award to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Maine.
Her work is included in numerous public and private collections. Her commissioned site-specific work can be seen in public spaces in Toronto and New England. She has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries nationally and internationally. Her work is featured in publications here and abroad. She has received many fellowships, grants, awards, and sponsored residencies. Please see CV for more in depth information.
Ainslie is represented by Gallery NAGA in Boston and is a Professor at Northeastern University in Boston. She maintains a studio in Somerville.
