Artist Biography

Douglas M. Brewster was born in 1952. He grew up in Bossier City, Louisiana, the home of Barksdale Air Force Base.
He finished High School in 1970 and attended the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now known as the University of Louisiana-Lafayette). Douglas followed the wanderlust of the times to travel and work around Louisiana, the US and Europe; He completed his BFA degree in 1978 to his mother’s great relief.

Washington State University in Pullman, WA awarded him a teaching fellowship for MFA studies in 1978. He finished his MFA degree in 1980 and married Hasmig Vartanian, a fellow grad student and artist. They moved south to Houston then to Lafayette where he was the Assistant Director of Admissions at USL from 1982-87.

Brewster’s first major show was Douglas M. Brewster Paintings 1972-1985 at the University Art Museum in Lafayette in 1985.

In 1987 Douglas and Hasmig moved to New Orleans to pursue teaching and art in Louisiana’s largest city .In 1991 he was the Project Director of the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center’s “Artists on War” exhibition.
Brewster exhibited regularly at area galleries and institutions and taught Talented Visual Arts in the Orleans and St. Tammany Parish public schools.
In 1994 Douglas was awarded a NEA/SAF individual artist fellowship. The next year he was awarded an Art Matters Fellowship in Painting.

Life changed in Louisiana after Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. Brewster’s New Orleans studio in Mid City was flooded with 8 feet of water and his teaching position was lost when the Orleans Parish School Board fired all 5,000 of its teachers in order to break the teacher’s union.
The October 2006 show at Barrister’s Gallery Douglas M. Brewster works 1993-2005 was among the first art exhibits in New Orleans after the flood.

In 2006 Douglas went to work as a fine arts instructor at Delgado Community College until his retirement in 2017. He lives in Covington, LA and continues to create art at his studio there. He does not think or write in the third person except when instructed to by website experts.