Biography
Nichol Markowitz is an American printmaker and master printer based in Oakland, California, and the founder of Moonlight Press, an Oakland printmaking studio and limited-edition publisher. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007 and later a master's degree in modern art history from Azusa Pacific University in 2022, building the years between those degrees around hands-on master-printing practice rather than a conventional academic studio progression. She worked as a printer at Hui Press on Maui and at Mullowney Printing, the San Francisco intaglio publisher, and then served for about ten years as art director and master printer for the Oakland-based artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez.
She has executed editions for a substantial roster of contemporary artists, including Josephine Taylor, Solange Roberdeau, Judy Pfaff, Joyce Kozloff, Nicola López, Sandow Birk, Lothar Osterberg, Emilie Clark, Max Gimblett, Katsura Funakoshi, Swoon, and Artemio Rodriguez. Moonlight Press, the Oakland studio she founded, specializes in copper-plate etching, mokuhanga, and traditional Japanese scroll-mounting, and operates simultaneously as a contract-printing studio for visiting artists and as a teaching space running rotating workshops. Her own studio practice as an artist — distinct from her work on other artists' editions — is organized around memory and the construction of the self, drawing image-material from personal photographs and from the forms of the natural world. In 2024 her work was included in the juried international exhibition of the International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen, Japan. Her work in scroll-mounted format is an unusual extension of mokuhanga into a finished display object more commonly associated with East Asian painting, and Moonlight Press remains one of the more active small studios for the medium on the West Coast.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇺🇸United States
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Nichol Markowitz is an American printmaker and master printer based in Oakland, California, and the founder of Moonlight Press, an Oakland printmaking studio and limited-edition publisher. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007 and later a master's degree in modern art history from Azusa Pacific University in 2022, building the years between those degrees around hands-on master-printing practice rather than a conventional academic studio progression. She worked as a printer at Hui Press on Maui and at Mullowney Printing, the San Francisco intaglio publisher, and then served for about ten years as art director and master printer for the Oakland-based artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez.
Nichol Markowitz's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.