About

Hi, thanks for visiting. 

Kathy Emsoff is an aspiring printmaker based in Austin, Texas. She is drawn to printmaking’s combination of planning, process, materials, and alchemy in the way an image is developed through a series of deliberate decisions but is not fully revealed until it passes through the press. Her current practice includes photopolymer intaglio, etching, chine collé, and relief processes, with an emphasis on experimentation and learning.

Kathy has built her career in user experience, holding design leadership roles at companies including Dell and Charles Schwab. Her more recent work in user research has deepened her interest in human perception: how people see, interpret, and make meaning from what is in front of them. She holds a BA in Communication from the University of Texas Permian Basin and a Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design from the University of California, Irvine.

Her interest in making images began in childhood and has surfaced in different forms throughout her life. In 2008, she stepped away from her career for several years to pursue letterpress printing, but ultimately found its production-oriented nature less satisfying than making individual works of art. Her visual education has developed through college art courses, graduate study in design, and a career spent working with visual language. More recently, she has extended that foundation through printmaking classes at Flatbed Press in Austin.

Kathy’s perspective was also shaped by childhood summers spent on archaeological excavations with her father in the American Southwest. Those experiences taught her to look beyond the limits of her own viewpoint and to recognize that objects, images, and beliefs acquire meaning through the people who make and encounter them. They continue to influence her interest in perception, accessibility, and the enduring human impulse to make and share art..