Bio

Jill Stoddard was born in Gardner, Massachusetts in 1968 (Generation X) and grew up in Ashby, Massachusetts, next to hundreds of acres of forest. She made her first drawing at age five—a woman holding a cow under her arm—and wrote her first story at six, about a bear and an ice cube who became friends. After high school, she attended the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where she earned a BA in English with a focus in creative writing.

In the 1990s, Stoddard lived in the Mission District of San Francisco and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During this period, she wrote for Cups, Might magazine, and McSweeney’s. She was accepted into the MFA program in fiction at Emerson College but withdrew after the first week rather than take on student debt.

In 2000, she moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where over the next sixteen years she focused on oil painting and drawing using found objects and cardboard as surfaces, as well as site-specific installations and storytelling. In 2016, she began dividing her time between Philadelphia and New York. Throughout her career, Stoddard has worked various full-time jobs to support herself.

In 2022, she returned to Massachusetts and now lives in Greenfield.


(All photographs on this site were taken with a camera and have not been altered. Bio photograph courtesy of longtime friend Pixel.)

https://www.instagram.com/stodjilly/