About

Barbara Balzer is an international award-winning figurative ceramic artist. Having grown up as a daughter of a farm-boy turned U.S. Air Force officer, she traveled the world with her family. As a teenager, she left Clark Air Base in the Philippines to attend college at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, where her maternal grandfather had taught. There, she was awarded both a B.A. and an M.A. in American Literature and European Literature and Thought, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She subsequently attended law school there, earning a J.D. degree and serving as a Law Review Editor. From Iowa, she traveled to Florida to clerk at the First District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee. She later worked as a Staff Attorney in the Florida Senate Committee for Consumer Affairs, where she wrote Florida’s Lemon Law. For the next two decades, Barbara did many other things as well: raise a family, serve as her son’s homeroom mother, and race for Nike South to qualify for the first Woman’s Olympic Marathon Trials. But, always, she explored with clay, in the evenings, on the weekends, at workshops, educating herself about what clay can do. After her son left for college, Barbara turned to art full-time. She was awarded an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Florida State University College of Dance and Art, walking distance from her home. Her work began winning awards, at first locally, then regionally, then internationally. She has since exhibited work both nationally and internationally and conducted workshops, and attended art residencies in both Europe and Asia. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museo de Ceramica in Manises, Spain, the Yingge Museum of Ceramics in Taiwan, the Macon Museum of Art and Science in Georgia and Vero Beach Center for the Arts in Florida. She considers herself one in a long line of sculptors of the human form, beginning with the anonymous maker of the Venus de Willendorf over 25,000 years ago. Barbara continues to make work in her Tallahassee studio, always in service of an idea.