Tamara English’s work explores the experience of the presence of the divine in life, referencing the visual vocabulary of elements of the natural world as a way to connect with one’s personal understanding of the sacred. She holds a BFA in painting from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. Her oil paintings have been exhibited extensively in the US and abroad, including at the New Orleans Museum of Art, The Lesher Art Center in the Bay Area, the Eisemann Center in Dallas, at the US Embassy in RIga, Latvia, and most recently at the Seattle Art Museum. She has been awarded several grants from the Regional Arts & Culture Council in Portland, and received the Charles Carey Life Drawing Prize. She was recently named a recipient of the Ford Family Foundation Oregon Visual Artist Mid-career Residency Award. Her paintings have appeared in the television series “Portlandia,” and she was featured in the documentary “Art: PDX.” Her work is in widely collected and represented in the collections of Lock Haven University, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and a former US president. English lives and works in Portland, Oregon.