Leah Kohlenberg, founder of The Roaming Studio online drawing classes and online painting classes, is herself a bit of a roamer.  As an artist, she has spent five years living, studying and teaching art in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, and one year in Brooklyn, New York, before moving to Portland, Oregon, which she currently calls home.

 

In her previous career, as a journalist, she spent four years living in Asia,  covering the Hong Kong handover to China with Time Magazine, and working as a journalist trainer (as an International Knight Fellow) in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia.  She's spent nearly a decade training journalists in various former Soviet countries.  So she's been around.

 

Primarily a self-taught artist, Kohlenberg has been painting for 15 years.  She has taken classes at the Gage Academy, the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and studied privately with Armenian painters Hakob Hovannisyan, Arthur Sarkissian, and Suren Nersisyan, and with Georgian artist Lado Pochkhua, and with Portland artists Don Bishop and Joanne Licardo.  Her work has been shown at the Hadas Gallery in Brooklyn, New York; at the Műveleti Terület Gallery in Budapest, Hungary; and at the American Embassy in Yerevan, Armenia, among others.  She has currently been selected to participate in Portland Open Studios 2015, in the second two weeks of October.  She also recently received a Regional Arts and Culture Council grant to publish her first book, The Roaming Studio Guide to Drawing Faces (slated for publication this fall).

 

She won a merit prize in the American Juried Online Art Salon 2010 Spring and Summer Show.  She has taught art for eight years, helping start an English language art school called Sziv Studios in Budapest, with American artist Paula Brett, and teaching hundreds of students of all ages in Yerevan, Armenia, Zagreb, Croatia, and Brooklyn, NY.   She founded The Roaming Studio in 2010, offering live online drawing classes and online painting classes to students all over the world. You can reach her at leah@theroamingstudio.com, or by calling 1-347-251-1984.

 

You can see her work here:

 

www.facebook.com/leahkohlenbergoriginalart

or

www.leahkohlenberg.com