Monika Beisner was born in Hamburg in 1942 and studied painting in Braunschweig and Berlin. A German Academic Exchange Scholarship and a Fulbright Grant enabled her to study at the Slade School of Art in London (where she currently lives) and the New School for Social Research in New York. She then embarked on a career as an illustrator of books and has published 16 books in multiple languages between 1971 and 1994 which earned her an international reputation and exhibitions worldwide.
The most recent publications with her illustrations are of Dante’s Comedy – Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso (2007), and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a portfolio of 36 giclée prints (2010). Monika Beisner has also completed a series of 29 paintings for Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest surviving poem which is in the process of being put into book form and in the early stages of planning for an exhibition of the work included in the book.
At present she is working on a cycle of paintings, Daphne Variations, which take as their starting point another tale from Metamorphoses.
The book Forest of Things: Monika Beisner - Conversations with Robert Bush, which explores her life in art, was published in 2021.
