Janet Kozachek hails from Princeton Junction, New Jersey, where her rural formative years were spent drawing and writing in nature. Her subsequent education was unusually eclectic, having traveled, worked and studied in Europe, China and the United States. Her Master of Fine Arts Degree is from Parsons School of Design in New York, where she studied figurative drawing and painting with Larry Rivers, Paul Resika, Leland Bell, and John Heliker, and Ekphrastic Poetry writing with J.D. McClatchy. Her Certificate of Graduate Study in Chinese Art from the Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) in the People’s Republic of China included the study of Chinese poetry and painting. Her undergraduate study at Rutgers was in science (biology) and art.
In addition to her painting, Janet Kozachek is a well-known mosaic artist, and was the Founding President of the Society of American Mosaic Artists. Her work is in a number of museums and private collections, and she was the recipient of the award for excellence in drawing from Art Fields (2019), a Puffin Foundation Award, National Endowment for the Arts awards, a Heritage Foundation Award, and a Humanities Council Award. Her poetry and illustrations have been published in Undefined magazine, the journal Ekphrasis, and Local Life. Ms. Kozachek is the author of The Book of Marvelous Cats, an illustrated book of rhymes for the cat, and My Women, My Monsters, an illustrated chapbook of poetry. My Women My Monsters, won an Honorable Mention award from Concrete Wolf Press and was published in 2020 by Finishing Line Press. Janet Kozachek was the recipient of the 2020 Common Ground on the Hill Award for Excellence in the Traditional Arts. Her next full length illustrated poetry book, A Rendering of Soliloquies: Figures Painted in Spots of Time, will be released in spring, 2022.
Ms. Kozachek is represented by the Artisan’s Center in Walterboro, SC.
