Jill Bliss was born in Northern California. Her formative years were spent in a do-it-yourself farming household, whiling away many hours romping around the orchards and fields, closely inspecting the plants and animals on a daily basis.
Jill’s sparse-yet-dense color and design stems from an urban adulthood spent in New York, at Parsons School of Design (BFA 2000), and San Francisco, at California College of the Arts (MFA 2004). In 10 years between the two coasts, she picked up three distinct academic and professional backgrounds that she uses on a daily basis in her Portland, Oregon, studio: fashion design, illustration and design theory.
An independent artist and designer since 2001, Jill has been selling her art, design and craft work directly to fans online or via indie boutiques around the world, along the way becoming an indie-business icon. Transcending studio art, graphic design or craft culture, her name has become a lo-fi lifestyle brand—a grass-roots counterpart to Martha Stewart or Ralph Lauren—with her hand-drawn or handmade depictions of the natural world at the center of all she does.
Some of Jill’s work and her current studio space are featured in the book Handmade Nation, and her comments about the cultural aspects of the new Handmade Movement are a part of the corresponding documentary by Faythe Levine.
