Jeff Whipple

Work: "Chicken Feet"
When: 7 pm Friday, March 19, 2004
Where: HCC Ybor Performing Arts Theater

Jeff Whipple is an artist, writer and filmmaker based in Tampa, Florida. His paintings and sculpture have been featured in more than 60 solo exhibitions in galleries, universities and museums throughout the USA. He has participated in dozens of group exhibitions across the country and won numerous top awards in art competitions. His artwork is in notable private collections as well as colleges, corporations and museums.

Whipple won fellowships for visual art from the Illinois Arts Council in 1985 and 1990 and from the Florida Arts Council in 1982. In 2001, he was the first recipient of the Fulton Ross Award for Artists, a $10,000 grant based on career achievements.

Whipple's work as a playwright and filmmaker has paralleled his visual art career. He has won several playwriting awards and his plays have been featured in sixteen productions and dozens of staged readings in Chicago and Florida. In 1996, Whipple won a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship for play writing. His play THE MEAT BUSH was produced in 2001 at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, Florida as the winner of the Florida Playwright's Process. His most recent play, THE TERRORISM OF LOVE was produced in 2002 in Orlando as a 3-time winner of the Valencia Character Company's Florida Playwriting Competition. His videos have been featured in film festivals.

Whipple received a MFA from the University of South Florida in 1980. He has taught at several colleges including Arizona State University and Northern Illinois University.

Jeff Whipple has been commissioned to create several large public art works. His most recent is a 150 foot-long mural for the Johnson Branch Library in St. Petersburg, Florida, which he completed last September.

In 2002, the Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo, Florida presented a 25-year retrospective of Jeff Whipple's art, which traveled to Orlando and Naples in 2003.