Susan Sensemann (born 1949) is an American artist, educator and arts administrator, most known for her detailed, largely abstract patterned paintings and photomontages reflecting gothic, baroque, spiritual and feminist sensibilities. She has exhibited her work at venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, A.I.R., The Living Art Museum (Reykjavík), Indianapolis Art Center, Chicago Cultural Center, and Art Institute of Boston, on four continents. Her work has been widely reviewed and resides in numerous private, university and corporate collections. Sensemann is known as a versatile and prolific creator, whose ideas have led her to explore diverse painting materials, media (drawing, photography, collage, performance), subject matter (architectural, botanical, biological and organic forms, self-portraiture), and styles from abstraction to realism. Critics note her work's densely packed compositions, shallow fields of oscillating space, complex tactile surfaces, and sensuous color and linearity. James Yood wrote that Sensemann's abstract paintings were "fraught with meaning, charged with value, and seething with import" in their spiritual seeking. Art historian Leisa Rundquist described her photomontage self-portraits as "strangely sensual, yet disturbing" images drawn from "the depths of the unconscious." In addition to her art career, Sensemann was an art professor and administrator for over three decades, most notably at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the grassroots women's cooperative Artemisia Gallery. She has also been a frequent curator and lecturer, and in recent years, begun writing fiction and teaching courses in mindfulness meditation. Sensemann has been based in Chicago since 1979. Life and career Sensemann was born in Glen Cove, New York in 1949. Her early interest in art was sparked by trips with her mother to New York City art museums and a supportive art teacher who introduced her to Cubism in sixth grade. She studied printmaking at Syracuse University (BFA, 1971), but gravitated to painting after spending junior year at the Tyler School of Art, Rome. She enrolled in the graduate program at Tyler at Temple University (MFA, painting, 1973), studying with painter Richard Callner, whose mythological paintings and glazing techniques influenced her early work. In 1973, Sensemann took a teaching position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. While there, she met her future husband, sculptor Barry Hehemann. They married in 1979 and moved into a live/work loft in Chicago's industrial Bucktown neighborhood (they divorced in 2004). In 1981, Sensemann joined the faculty at the School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC),