Jennifer Strange-Keller

A native of Indianapolis, Indiana, Jennifer earned her Bachelor of Art degree from Indiana University, Bloomington in 1982 in painting and drawing. During her undergraduate studies, she studied in Florence, Italy. In 1985, Jennifer returned to Italy, as a scholarship recipient during graduate studies in fine arts. She spent three months in Cortona, a medieval hill town in central Italy. In 1986, she received her Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Georgia, Athens.

Jennifer enjoys both landscape and figurative painting, particularly work inspired by her travels. Along with her studio work, she has taught studio arts courses for Indiana University at Kokomo, IUPUI, and Art History at Butler University.  She also does freelance illustration and mural painting. Clients have included The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, The Indiana State Museum, and the Indianapolis Zoo.

For the last several years, she has been involved in creating drawings and sculptures inspired from Dante Alighieri’s medieval poem The Divine Comedy. Although the work is ongoing, a significant collection has been displayed in various exhibitions including, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the National Academy of Design in New York. International exhibits include Temple University, Rome Campus and Palazzo Casali in Cortona, Italy.  In recent years, she has been invited to speak about her work by several major universities including the University of Notre Dame, Purdue University, Boston College, Bucknell and the University of Kentucky. Additional exhibitions include Indiana University at Kokomo, Indiana University at Richmond, The Christel DeHaan Fine Arts Center Gallery at the University of Indianapolis and the Spirit in Place Festival sponsored by IUPUI. The PBS program “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” selected several drawings as visual aides during an interview with Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky regarding his translation of the Divine Comedy. Columbia University exhibits the drawings online via their Digital Dante website.  The website, Inspiredbydante.com has become an international visual resource for students of Dante and has received over 65,000 views to date.

“Although the Dante work has played an important roll in my career, I consider myself a painter. In every landscape that I paint, I seek to share two things; my love of nature preserved as a painterly expression and my desire to capture the essence of the place, full of light and life. In this regard, my life is devoted to the pursuit of discovering life.