Kate Capshaw.

Born in 1953 in Fort Worth, Texas, and raised in Ferguson, Missouri, Kate Capshaw is a contemporary figurative painter whose work explores portraiture as a site of empathy, visibility, and social connection. Her practice engages deeply with the emotional resonance of the human face, positioning painting as a conduit for narrative, an exchange between artist and subject.

Capshaw received a Bachelor's in Education and a Master’s in Special Education from University of Missouri–Columbia. She set up the first primary program (K-5) for children with learning disabilities in rural Southern Boone County, Missouri. She also spent one year as an itinerant teacher serving high school adolescents with learning challenges.

After working in films over two decades, Capshaw began her concentrated art studies in 2009, including figurative charcoal, watercolor, photography and oil painting. Since then, she has singularly focused on portraiture.

In 2016, Capshaw began her series Unaccompanied, a body of work that uses portraiture to address youth homelessness in America. The project received critical attention when her work was blindly selected as a finalist in The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition (Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, 2019). The accompanying exhibition, The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today, traveled to the Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts at the Springfield Museums in Massachusetts (2020–21) and the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis (2022).

Her first solo museum installation Exclusive Tonsorial Services (Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2024–25) continued Capshaw’s exploration of community-based portraiture through a painting and a photography-based work depicting Miami barber Sergei Grant and the children who received his haircuts—a meditation on labor, care, and the quiet architectures of community. Capshaw’s portraits have also been presented at the Bo Bartlett Center, Columbus State University (2023); the Henry Street Settlement, New York (2023); ADAA’s The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory (2023) and the New York Academy of Art (2024).

Most recently, Capshaw was commissioned by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery to paint Academy Award–winning director, producer, and writer Steven Spielberg, an honoree of the 2025 Portrait of a Nation Awards. Her work, The Picture Maker (2025), combines film projection and oil painting on canvas with dimensions chosen by Capshaw to reflect the 1:33 aspect ratio, mirroring the proportions of Spielberg’s first medium, 8 mm film. Through the interplay of medium and material, Capshaw constructs an image that invites contemplation of authorship, perception, and the layered nature of representation itself. The work is on view on the National Portrait Gallery’s first floor through November 15, 2026.