DOZENS

Born in Paris and growing up in Provence, France, sculptor and painter Valérie Chaussonnet came to the US in 1984 for graduate school. She worked for eleven years at the Smithsonian Institution’s Natural History Museum as a museum anthropologist, a specialist of Siberia and the Canadian and American Arctic. Her research on shamanism and Native art and symbolism is still informing her own artwork to this day. She studied sculpture at the Corcoran Art School in Washington, DC, then attended various art classes at ACC after moving to Austin in 1997 to raise her two sons.