Information provided by the Artist: Cynthia Hipkiss was born in New York in 1948 but has lived in Sonoma most of her life. She attended California College of Arts and Crafts where she took her first ceramic class and fell in love with clay. Hipkiss moved to Sonoma and finished her education at Sonoma State with a degree in art. After graduating in 1970, she showed at an art festival in Berkeley where she made enough money to buy her first kiln. She has been working in clay ever since.