Susan Stillman, born in 1956, is a contemporary American painter. Her landscape paintings manifest her preoccupation with light and its transfiguration, using the backdrop of her own suburban neighborhood. 

Stillman holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Brooklyn College. She spent a year in Rome studying painting in RISD’s European Honors Program. A life-long educator, Stillman has been a faculty member at Parsons School of Design since 1983. 

Her work has been featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among others. In her early years as an illustrator, her clients included The New York Times, New York Magazine, Scholastic, and numerous others. Stillman was chosen to illustrate a special centennial edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses for Book of the Month Club, and she worked with writer Pete Hamill to illustrate his book, The Invisible City, a New York Sketchbook. 

“This landscape I see every day shapes my work in paint. It's a foundation from which to explore the relationships of the natural to the man-made. The views from my windows high on the hill, and my daily walks in all seasons feed my preoccupation with light and the way it effects change in color and tonalities. Series have evolved as I revisit images that have left an impression in my memory. The scale of the work has an impact on how the images are perceived, as larger paintings invite the viewer to enter the space created, and smaller scale work feels fragmentary, echoing my experiences of moving through the landscape and noticing flashes of color on the periphery. An absence of the figure is deliberate, disallowing any imposition of ‘story’ and leaving the focus entirely on the moment captured and it’s specific qualities of light, color and tonal saturation. Intensity in the chromatic range brings to mind the hours when the sun is lowest in the sky. The simplicity of the subject is transformed by the moment of illumination and by our unexpected attention.”