Born in Washington D.C., Andrea Zemel received her BFA from the University of Pennsylvania in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She later completed her MFA in 1991 at Penn’s Graduate School of Fine Arts, studying painting under Neil Welliver and printmaking with Hitoshi Nakazato. Welliver’s realist formalism and Nakazato’s minimal conceptualism both had an impact on her thinking. She later spent three years on the faculty at Penn, having launched a collaborative and public art program that continues to this day. A deep interest in psychoanalysis and hermeneutics informs her work, which contains both narrative and conceptual elements. Regardless of medium, Zemel’s work maintains a concern for detail while giving authority to the physical material.

In the 90’s, she exhibited paintings, works on paper and sculpture in galleries, art centers and public installations in the United States and Eastern Europe, including shows at the Sculpture Center and Book Center in New York, the Print Center, I.C.A. and Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia, the Museum of Foreign Art in Riga, Latvia and the National Library in Sofia, Bulgaria. She received numerous Art Residencies grants and completed several public works through the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Philadelphia Museum and the Arlington Humanities Project. She has published in the Art Journal and her images were regularly featured on the on-line magazine FlashPoint.

In 2000, Zemel left academia and moved to New York with her partner Adam Brown where they founded Iliad Antik in the heart of Manhattan’s design district. In 2001, she launched Iliad Design to create high-end commissioned furnishings at her workshop in Prague, Czech Republic. She currently divides her time between her Manhattan gallery and her art studios in Hoboken and the mountains of rural Pennsylvania.