Jen Craun is a Cleveland-based printmaker and maker of Artist Books. She attended Kent State University, where she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Art Education in 2000. Following graduation, she spent a semester in Italy, and traveled to the European cities of London, Paris, Berlin and Rome. While in Florence, she attended printmaking courses from the Il Bisonte print shop and created a suite of woodcut prints and numerous artist journals documenting her travels. Craun returned to Kent State as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at KSU, in the Printmaking Department, where she earned her MFA in 2003. That same year, she received an Artist Residency scholarship at Zygote Press, a non-profit gallery and print studio in Cleveland. In 2004, she was awarded an Artist in Residency to the Grafikwerkstatt Printshop in Dresden, Germany through the Ohio Arts Council.
After 10 years with Zygote Press, Craun resigned from her post as the Associate Director in 2014 to persue her studio practice and art making full time. She teaches as an adjunct professor in the Printmaking Department for the Cleveland Institute of Art, specifically the Artist Book courses. As one of the lead artist-residents for Progressive Arts Alliance–a nonprofit organization that partners with local schools to provide professional arts integration–Craun enjoys teaching residencies for both printmaking and book arts programs. She functioned also as the curriculum development and arts-integration consultant for PAA in 2013.
Craun works primarily in wood intaglio, etching, letterpress and collage, creating mixed-media prints as well as artist book forms. Her work has been exhibited locally at BayArts, Beck Center for the Arts, Cleveland Public Art, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Heights Arts, Massilon Museum of Art, Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory, SPACES, and Zygote Press.
She has exhibited both her print and artist book work nationally and internationally, and is included in the collections of: The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, The Vern Riffe Center for Government + Arts of The Ohio Arts Council, The Grafikwerkstatt Printshop, Cleveland Institute of Art Gund Library Artist Book Collection, MetroHealth Hospitals, the Westin Hotel Cleveland, Intercontinental Hotel Cleveland, Southern Graphic Council, Kent State University Printmaking Archives, Akron School of Art, and Zygote Press, Inc. Craun lives and makes her work–in her home studio, as well as Zygote Press–in Cleveland with her husband and two children.
