Background
Susanna Heller was born in New York City in 1956 and raised in Montreal from age 7.
Susanna Heller was born in New York City in 1956 and raised in Montreal from age 7.
Born in New York City and raised in Montreal, she studied art in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1978. At NSCAD, she studied under Gerald Ferguson, Eric Fischl, Mira Schor, Paterson Ewen, Robert Berlind, Garry Kennedy, Dan Graham, and Lawrence Weiner.
She was a landed immigrant in Canada until 2006. She exhibits her work regularly in New York and in Toronto. She is known equally in Canada and the United States for her contributions to contemporary art as a painter.
Her work is most well known for depictions of cities, primarily New York City.
Between 1975-1978, she also worked with visiting artists such as June Leaf, Richards Jarden, Michael Snow, Laurie Anderson, David Askevold, and others In 1978 Heller returned to New York City, and has lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn since 1981.
She worked for several years as a waitress, in construction, and as a security guard and cleaner at the Metropolitan Museum of Artist In 1981 she received her first Canada Council “B” grant.
In 1984 she lived for a year at the Cite International, in Paris after receiving a one-year residency grant from the Canada Council.
In 1989, Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery mounted a solo exhibition of Heller"s called Nova Scotia Paintings that was curated by Gerald Ferguson. In 2003 she had a solo exhibition at the London Museum, London, Ontario, entitled from Here. Heller had a studio on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center from 1998 to 1999.
This studio was provided as part of a 15-month long artists’ residency called World Views, organized by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Following 2001, she executed paintings based on the tragedy of September 11, 2001 and of the remaining ruins of the World Trade Center that were exhibited in numerous public and independent galleries. Heller has shown regularly and is represented by Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto, Canada since 1989, represented by Magnan Metz Gallery in New York City since 2006, and John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York since 2011.
In the summer of 2015 her work was shown in the two person exhibition Surroundings: Yun-Fei Ji and Susanna Heller at the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She currently lives and works in Greenpoint Brooklyn, New New York 2005 The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant Award.