Biography

Pamela Benham’s insistent drive to create expressive paintings is seen throughout her artistic evolution from impressionistic landscapes to photorealistic portraits to her present works, expansive painterly abstracts.

Benham studied painting in New York City at the Art Students’ League under a full Ford Foundation Scholarship, and graduated from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.  She then studied in Paris for two years at the Ecolé des Beaux-Arts with Pierre Carron.  Other influential teachers were Robert Beverly Hale, Wolf Kahn, Dory Ashton, Paul Resika, Leland Bell and Stephen Posen.

Recipient of an Adolph Gottlieb Grant, Benham was also awarded artist-in-residencies at Skowhegan School in Maine, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Parson’s Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic, and Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. 

She has exhibited internationally in museums and galleries including the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City, the Musée d’Art Moderne and the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris.  She has had over twenty solo exhibitions in galleries in New York including the Miller, Susan Schreiber and Jayne Baum Gallery.

Her work was most recently seen in the SB Museum of Art Women’s Board’s Off the Wall event, and in her solo exhibitions at Gallery 113, the Faulkner Gallery and at the UCSB Faculty Club where she also curated and participated in COLOR X 6, a group show of six abstract painters from Santa Barbara.

After twenty-four years in New York City, Pamela Benham has now established her painting studio, Studio 93, in Santa Barbara and considers it her true home.