Judith Belzer
Judith Belzer (born 1956 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American painter based in Berkeley, California. She earned a B.A. in English (at Barnard College) and studied art at New York Studio School. After living and working on the East Coast (including a period in rural Connecticut), she moved to Berkeley in 2003 — a relocation that had a significant impact on her artistic vision, giving her a broader, more expansive landscape to draw inspiration from.
Belzer is best known for her semi-abstract oil paintings and watercolors that depict “invented landscapes”, spaces where the natural environment and the built world overlap, collide, and coexist in uneasy, evocative harmony. Her works often avoid literal representation, instead evoking mood, pattern, texture, and a sense of dynamic tension between human-made structures and the natural world.
Her art has been exhibited at many respected venues, including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), the Nevada Museum of Art, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and the Mills College Art Museum, and is held in the permanent collections of several institutions.
In 2014, Belzer received a prestigious fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in recognition of her achievements in fine arts.
Belzer is married to writer and journalist Michael Pollan; the couple met at college.
