Elaine Souda was born in Massachusetts and grew up in Miami, Florida. After graduating from university she took the next plane to New York City with an art fellowship to the Art Student’s League where she studied with Robert Beverly Hale and Richard Pousette-Dart. The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, Guggenheim and Whitney and the great museums of Europe were also her classrooms, as well as the streets of New York. In the early 80’s she was a graffiti artist in the subways of NYC working as “es53” along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Her paintings have been shown in galleries in the United States and abroad. She left New York City in 2000 and now lives between Boston and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.