Artist Biography

Michele Arcidiacono Krup is a California-based artist, educator, and advocate for the arts. Her career has taken her around the world. After earning her MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, she worked as a technical illustrator and cartographer aboard the research vessel SP Lee as part of the Marine Sciences Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Sailing the South Pacific while studying ocean currents and temperatures, she crossed the equator twice and became a proud lifelong member of the Imperium Neptuni Regis. Back on land, she was one of the first technical illustrators at the University of California to use the internet to transmit visual data. A love of the Earth and its diverse cultures continues to inform her art and teaching. 

Prof. Krup joined the Contra Costa Community College District in 1987 as a member of the faculty at Los Medanos College and Diablo Valley College. She became a full professor in the Art Department at Diablo Valley College, where she nurtured generations of students in her courses on drawing, watercolor, painting, mixed media, and 2D design. Following several productive years as Art Department Chair, in 2013 Prof. Krup took her teaching abroad, conducting art history and art studio classes in her ancestral home of Florence, Italy. Excited to embrace the new, Prof. Krup extended her practice to include iPad art, YouTube instructional content creation, and research in natural pigments. 

Following her retirement from Diablo Valley College in 2020, she returned to Italy to research the creative women of the Italian Renaissance who continue to inspire her own practice and mentoring. She currently divides her time between her studio and her garden of plants from California and the Mediterranean, while pursuing her lifelong love of fashion design. She lives with her husband in the East Bay and enjoys using their garden ingredients in creative cooking for her children.