Audrey Niffenegger trained as a visual artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received her MFA from Northwestern University’s Department of Art Theory and Practice. She has exhibited her artist’s books, prints, paintings, drawings and comics at Printworks Gallery in Chicago since 1987. Her first books were printed and bound by hand in editions of ten. Two of these have since been commercially published by Harry N. Abrams: The Adventuress and The Three Incestuous Sisters.
Initially imagined as a graphic novel, Niffenegger realized that her idea for a book about a time traveler and his wife would be difficult to represent in still images. She began to work on the project as a novel, and published The Time Traveler’s Wife in 2003 with the independent publisher MacAdam/Cage. It was an international best seller, and has been made into a movie.
Niffenegger helped to found a new book arts center, the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. Niffenegger was part of this group and has taught book arts and fiction writing there, as well as the Newberry Library, Penland School of Craft and other institutions of higher learning.
Niffenegger is a founding member of the writing collective Text 3 (T3), who publish the litmag little Bang. Niffenegger’s second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, was published in 2009. In 2008 she made a serialized graphic novel for the London Guardian, The Night Bookmobile, which was published in book form in September, 2010.
In 2013, a major mid-career retrospective of her prints, paintings and artist’s bookworks opened at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. Her illustrated novella, Raven Girl, was also published the same year in conjunction with the Royal Opera House Ballet production of Raven Girl, which was choreographed by Wayne McGregor.
She is working on her third novel, The Chinchilla Girl in Exile and a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife. She has lived in or near Chicago for most of her life.
