Nicole Wittenberg was born in San Francisco, California in 1979. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and held her first solo exhibition at San Francisco’s Masterworks Gallery in 2003. The works of English figurative artist Jenny Sevile and the late Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele serve as inspirations to her work, as do the figurative sculptures of Michelangelo. Wittenberg was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters coveted John Koch Award for best young figurative painter in 2012. She is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts and Colby College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine.