Born in 1963 in Big Sur, California, Erin Lee Gafill is an award-winning writer, painter, and teacher with deep roots in the California arts community.

For almost 30 years, Erin has taught arts, crafts, and creative writing programs to children and adults up and down California’s central coast. She co-founded the nonprofit arts education organization Big Sur Arts Initiative in 1998 to provide arts and cultural opportunities to local children and their families.

In 2001, Erin was honored to serve as the first American artist-in-residence of the Hamada International Children’s Art Museum in Hamada, Japan.

In 2008, after almost a decade of nonprofit work, Erin and her husband, Tom Birmingham, opened their own art studio in Monterey’s historic Doud House, offering workshops, art exhibitions, and a space for local arts groups to meet. In 2011, the Museum of Monterey presented a special exhibition, Cultivating Creativity, featuring Erin’s Doud House paintings.

In 2009, Erin and Tom were honored by the Arts Council for Monterey County as “Champions of the Arts” for their service to the community. In 2010, the couple launched a nationwide arts education tour, visiting 17 cities over nine weeks. They staged art shows and art salons, interviewed arts professionals, held workshops, and taught free art programs to children and their families.

Most recently, Erin’s still life work was featured in the summer exhibition Color Duets, a retrospective on thirteen annual painting retreats with her uncle, textile designer Kaffe Fassett.

Erin credits her deep familial roots in the arts for her ongoing work today. Her maternal grandparents, Lolly and Bill Fassett, built Big Sur’s famed Nepenthe restaurant, a mecca for artists, poets, writers, and bohemians since its opening day in 1949. Erin’s great-grandmother was Jane Gallatin Powers, a Modernist painter who had the first artist’s studio in Carmel in 1903.

Erin is on the creative arts faculty for Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, and teaches her Passion of Painting and Art of Now workshops throughout the United States, Italy, and online. She is the author of the inspirational memoir Drinking From a Cold Spring, a Little Book of Hope, and Color Duets with Kaffe Fassett. Erin’s still life paintings were featured in a two-person exhibition at the Monterey Museum of Art during Summer 2021. Erin Lee Gafill was the lead artist at The Sea Ranch Lodge during February 2022 for their Month of Inspiration. Work from this month-long painting retreat was featured in the Summer 2022 solo exhibition at the Morris-Graves Museum of Art in Eureka.

‍