Jean studied Fine Arts at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, and earned her Masters of Fine Arts Degree in painting from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. While pursuing her graduate degree, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine. During her time at these schools, Jean studied with many remarkable artists, including Neil Welliver, Janet Fish, Yvonne Jacquette, Rudy Burkhardt, Alex Katz, Francesco Clemente and Judy Pfaff.

Eager to teach - - Jean became very involved as an educator, pre-K to university level. She has taught many design, drawing and painting classes as an adjunct professor in the DC area. The opportunity to design and direct an open-inquiry critical and creative thinking lab for a Fairfax County public school offered a unique arena to engage children with the thinking dispositions of artists, designers and engineers (David Perkins). Other pedagogical influences for the lab included the theories of Multiple Intelligences (Howard Gardner) and Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihaly). Jean’s book about the program, Nine Thousand Straws: Teaching Thinking through Open-Inquiry Learning was published in 2008 (Libraries Unlimited).

When returning to full time studio work, Jean asked herself a pivotal question related to the Flow theory: When are you so engaged in an activity that you loose track of time? Her realization, when I’m building things, led to her departure from using stretched canvas to constructing mixed media assemblages.

Jean’s work is held in private and public collections and also shows in various exhibitions in the Washington, DC, area, New York and Connecticut. She has recently returned to the Skowhegan School for an alumni artist residency.