Rachel Berman

Rachel Berman was born Susan King in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1946. A self-taught artist, she spent decades working as an illustrator and painter across the United States, Canada, and Ireland. In 1998, at age fifty-two, she uncovered her original birth records and biological parentage, an event that led her to reclaim her birth name of Rachel Berman.

Over the final decades of her career, Berman made Victoria, British Columbia, her primary residence while maintaining a regular creative presence across Canada. Alongside her studio painting practice, she achieved national recognition as a children's book illustrator, receiving nominations for the Governor General's Literary Award for English-Language Children's Literature (Illustration) in both 2009 and 2013. Berman died at her home in Victoria on May 28, 2014, at the age of sixty-eight.