Anne Taintor

Taintor was born in 1953 in Lewiston, Maine to Frederick G. and Jane S. Taintor. Her father was a lawyer and her mother was a law school graduate turned housewife. She is the second of five children and lives in Portland, Maine, having returned to her home state after spending 11 years in New Mexico.[3]

After graduating from Lewiston High School in 1971, Taintor attended Harvard University, from which she graduated in 1977 with a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies.[1] As a student she enrolled in a class on collage animation, which would become her technique of choice.[2] Upon leaving Harvard, she eventually moved back to Maine working, among other things, as a cartographer drawing maps for state atlases. She continued to collage, selling her works at local craft fairs.[4]

In the early 1980s, Anne bounced around in different jobs, including as a waitress and a seamstress, while also working her way through a divorce.[5] At that time, she began focusing more on creating and selling her collages as a way to support herself and her daughter.[3] Her first products were handmade wooden lapel pins and earrings[3] with collage artwork, which she created by cutting and pasting artwork from 1940s and 1950s advertisements.[4]

In 1985, while at a garage sale in South Portland, Maine, Taintor came across an old Ladies Home Journal, which prompted her to begin creating what would become her signature work.[4][6] Her first piece of this kind, Intellectuals Gone Bad, was sold at the Maine Festival, an annual performance and crafts fair held in Portland, Maine, and featured an image of a woman and a man mixed with the caption "intellectuals gone bad". It was well received and, soon after, she started Anne Taintor, Inc.[1]

Celebrating her 25th anniversary in 2010, Taintor's work is available on her personal website and in thousands of retail locations across 25 countries.[1]