Biography, Barbara Kossy

Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1952, Barbara Kossy attended Hull House Art and Music Camp for two summers during her high school years and enjoyed the arts program at Evanston Township High School.

While at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio she studied film under Tony Conrad, and ceramics with Karen Shirley and Michael Jones. She studied for one semester at the San Francisco Art Institute taking classes from Richard Shaw, Richard Braughton, Margery Mann, and Pirkle Jones.

She worked as an assistant at Aperion photo workshops in Millerton, New York, where she met some of the great photographers of the 1970�s, including Bruce Davidson, Paul Caponigro, Robert Frank, and John Benson. As a lab assistant and student at The Louisville Center for Creative Photography she studied with C.J. Pressma.

She earned her MFA in filmmaking at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There she studied film with Stan Brackage and Robert Fulton. While in the graduate program she worked in the exhibits departments of The Field Museum of Chicago, and the John J. Shedd Aquarium. She also worked as an assistant for Kartemquin Films.

She relocated to Berkeley, California in 1978 and for two years produced Artwaves, a weekly public-access cable TV show on the visual arts. She interviewed more than 150 visual artists. Programs were cablecast in San Francisco and Oakland. She served on the board of directors of Pro Arts, a non-profit gallery in Oakland and curated three exhibitions.

She reviewed avant-garde film for Artweek, and wrote general art reviews for The Express and The Bay Guardian. She joined the public relations department of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for one year and moved on to the public information department of the Oakland Museum, now the Museum of California.

In 1992 she was a character fabricator on the Tim Burton cult classic Nightmare Before Christmas. Inspired by working in animated miniature she designed and produced whirligigs of paddling sea kayakers.

Working as a technical writer, Kossy continued traveling and kayaking and photographing in Italy. She produced a number of slide show talks on kayaking that she presented across the US.

She moved to Moss Beach in 1998 and bought her first digital camera in 2002 (a refurbished Nikon Coolpix 950). She served as a director of the San Mateo County Resource Conservation District for four years, and volunteers on the San Mateo County Weed Management Area Committee.