Jill Rupinski

Professor and Fine Arts Certificate Chair at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). Jill received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1981, and a Four-Year Certificate from PAFA in 1977. Among her awards are the prestigious William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship, PAFA 1976, the first recipient of the Philadelphia Mayor's award for Outstanding Achievement in the Fine Arts from PAFA in 1977, recipient of the Percy Owens Memorial Award for a Distinguished Pennsylvania Artist, 1997, Fellowship of PAFA, a 2013 recipient of the Faculty Venture Fund Grant for Travel to France from PAFA, selected to participate in the Senior Artists Initiative Oral History Project, 2014 and a 2023 recipient of The Philadelphia Sketch Club Medal for creativity and achievement in the visual arts.

Jill creates narrative works from observed forms of the human portrait and nature. Her landscape work is surreal, drawing on ideas about perception, and hidden form. Jill's portraiture evolves through conversation with the sitter, to research places, implements and relationships resulting in a visual story with the subject.

She is equally a painter in oil as well as in chalk and soft pastel. She is represented by Cerulean Arts Gallery and Studio in Philadelphia. Her works and commissions reside in many public and private collections including Arcadia, Colgate and Villanova Universities, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Hospital, and the University of Pennsylvania.