Laurie Lyman Balmuth was born in Hartford Connecticut and raised in Milford, a small seaside community on Long Island Sound. Balmuth exhibited early artistic talent, which was encouraged by her father, an inventor and painter. With her father she visited art museums in New Haven, New York City, and Boston.
As a young adult she attended the Boston Museum School and worked as an artist’s model there and in Maine. “Hearing teacher speak about drawing and feeling the lines that were being drawn by the students to describe my body as she posed on the model stand has filled my work with a love of drawing, the body and movement.”
She was a fiber artist in Maine and moved to Oregon in 1988 where she attended the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking in a five-year program. She attended the New York Studio program and divided her time between Portland and Manhattan where she maintained her studio. Balmuth exhibits her work nationally and internationally and traveled the world from London to Egypt studying art and antiquities.
Balmuth now lives in the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area, a spectacular setting of cliffs, mountains and the Columbia River; dramatic and ever changing with the mists and the seasons.