Born in 1980 in Heidelberg, West Germany to American academics, Sam Dahl has lived in America since 1985.  He was homeschooled from third grade through high school, and has been painting and drawing and building since age eight.  His heart set on a liberal education that would inform his art, Sam Dahl double-majored in studio art and religion at Dartmouth College.

 

Before graduating from Dartmouth, and while he was still naïve enough to make life-affecting decisions with little agony, he realized he was too much of a maker and a painter not to be an artist first, foremost, and for life.  For five years, Sam Dahl had his own studio in a restored 18th-century grist mill above the Delaware River in Titusville, New Jersey, where he made and sold work.

 

In 2007, he began a three-year MFA program at the University of Texas at Austin.  In 2010, receiving a degree in painting, he embarked on a new life in a new place, where he could be affected by a new terrain, teach, and make ever new bodies of work.

 

After Germany, the mid-Atlantic Eastern seaboard, New England, and Texas, he resided in Phoenix, Arizona until the summer of 2016.  During this period he was moved by the desert of Arizona, exploring new forms and subtle palettes.  His work became visible in a series of group shows and two solo shows at Five15 Arts Gallery in downtown Phoenix.   

 

Sam Dahl now currently resides and makes work just outside of St Paul, Minnesota.  His work is on shaped, non-rectangular wood or aluminum panel, as well as shaped intaglio prints on paper.  His media include oil paint, graphite, charcoal, and all the accessories necessary for relief, solar plate, and copper intaglio printmaking.