About the Author-Illustrator

Katherine A Smith was born in 1980. She grew up on the Mendocino Coast in California, USA. As a child, her pasttimes were art, writing, playing with both toy cars and horses (but almost never dolls), building models, and exploring the Jackson State Forest.

In school she was a good student, though never particularly social. She briefly played basketball, but devoted most of her energy to martial arts, particularly the style of American Parker Kenpo. She trained for ten years at the North Coast Dragons School of Martial Arts, where she was also an instructor for the kids classes, only leaving to go to college in 1998.

Katherine attended Humboldt State University for four years, and spent a fifth year on exchange to Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. She graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Zoology. During college, without a martial arts studio to train at, she switched to dance, learning ballet, jazz, modern, and post-modern, and danced in a number of shows. While at Bridgewater State College she danced with the Blau Rhino Dance Company, out of Kingston, Massachusetts. She also performed as an actor and actor-dancer-singer, and worked behind the scenes as a tech, as needed.

After college, she lived for two years in Oakland, working, dancing, and teching theater shows, before returning to school. She graduated in 2006 with a Graduate Certificate in Scientific Illustration from the University of California Santa Cruz. The next year she spent as a graphic desiner and illustrator for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, and then returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she worked for two years, before being laid-off along with many others. Since then, she has returned to school yet again. Currently, she is taking an intense one-year course in the Japanese language at Cornell University, and plans to live and work in Japan after graduation in May 2010.

Katherine has always enjoyed art and writing. Above all, she likes making up and telling stories: via words, drawings, dance, song, or stagecraft; the telling of a story is the motivating force.

For her art and design, Katherine likes to work in the following mediums:
Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, acrylic, pen and ink, graphite, and scratchboard

More information about Katherine (most particularly, frequently asked questions) can be found on the FAQ page.

Thank you for your interest.

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