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  I grew up in NYC, down the street from the Museum of Natural History and across the park from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the sixties I migrated west to study at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California at Davis.

After receiving my art degrees I exchanged large-scale oil for the intimacy of watercolors. I painted the world in relationship to myself-a central, emotionally charged figure, surrounded by symbols that reflected an inner state, influenced by folk art and Indian miniatures.

In 1973 I was invited to show my works on paper at the Whitney Museum of Art in NYC that resulted in my first confrontation with censorship. The art raised questions about male/female sexualtiy.

During the 1970's I taught criticism, the process of creativity and the Interrelationship of the arts at San Francisco State University and at the University of Colorado at Boulder for the semester at sea program. After sailing around the world I moved back to NYC for five years.

The eighties took me to the University of Arizona, Tucson and then to Austin, Texas, where I taught painting, watched birds and voluteered at an acupuncture clinic for people with AIDS. As I became familiar with the theory of Chinese medicine I discovered that the ideas echoed what I was trying to paint about.

I enrolled in acupuncture school, initially as a research project, illustrated the history of Chinese medicine and became a Board certified acupuncturist in 1991.

I live on a small island in Puget Sound, paint about the body as landscape, and the landscape as body, publish books on healing and the environment and maintain an acupuncture practice.

Ann Leda Shapiro