Katie Runde has been drawing ever since she could hold a crayon, marker, or pencil in hand. From drawing long, meandering snakes—‘getting her snakes out’—at the age of three to the present day, art has always been not only present, but necessary.

Katie fulfilled her lifelong ambition of having her own art exhibit at the age of fourteen, when she was the youngest artist ever accepted by a blind jury into the Corn Hill Arts Festival in Rochester, NY. From here, she turned to music, attending the Eastman School of Music in 2003 for classical saxophone performance and finding herself in demand for designing classmates’ recital posters as well. She double majored in folklore/ethnography and music at University College Cork in Ireland and played and recorded for several rock and funk bands in Cork between 2006 and 2009. All the while, she designed publicity materials for her band, accepted portrait commissions, and played with a budding interest in street art.

In 2009, she moved back to the United States to undertake her graduate studies at University of Chicago and spent the summer heaving hay and milking cows at Blythedale Farm in Corinth, VT. By the time she got to Chicago, the fresh air, mountains, and cows of Vermont had softened her zeal for academia, and she completed her Arts Masters in Religious Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School the following spring so that she could return to Vermont in the summer. Here she taught first and second grades and middle school art at Wellspring Waldorf School in Tunbridge, moonlighting in the Boston-based rock group The Van Burens and playing clarinet and saxophone for orchestras from the South Royalton Town Band to The Temptations.

The year after she graduated with her Waldorf Elementary Teacher Certification from the Sunbridge Institute in Chestnut Ridge, NY, the pull of the arts finally won over completely, and now Katie has committed herself to full-time work in art and music.

Her work has appeared at the Upstream Gallery in Dobbs Ferry, NY, Artistree Gallery in Woodstock, VT, won a viewer’s choice award at the Chandler Gallery in Randolph, VT, won second prize at the Connecticut Women Artists National Open Juried Exhibition at the Slater Memorial Museum in Norwich, CT, and joined the Marks Exhibition at the Madelon Powers Gallery of East Stroudsburg University in PA and the Winter Juried Show for the Lake Sunapee Center for the Arts . Her giant 3D chalk drawings have graced the entranceways of the Davis Center and the Royall Tyler Theatre at the University of Vermont in Burlington as well as the Maltex Lot for the 2013 South Burlington Art Hop.

Katie’s carefully rendered graphite and colored pencil drawing has developed through the years into a celebration of the personalities and presence of the people and animals she draws. She delights in color and the tricks that can be played with it and brings depth to her work by layering colors, often in unexpected combinations.