Susan Peterson is an artist, designer and educator.

Her sculpture and installation work has been exhibited at Zolla Lieberman Gallery, The Chicago Cultural Center, Randolph Street Gallery, N.A.M.E, The DePaul University Gallery, Gallery 400, UWM Art Museum (Milwaukee) and other venues in Chicago and across the Midwest. Peterson earned an MFA from The University of Illinois in Chicago and a BA from Carleton College. Peterson taught drawing, sculpture and graduate advising at UIC, SAIC, and DePaul University. She also spent 4 years as a 5th grade classroom teacher in the Chicago Public Schools.   

In 2001, Peterson co-founded Dermond Peterson, an artisanal manufacturer of home textiles in Milwaukee, WI. For the next 18 years she designed and oversaw the production of home textiles offered through such retailors as Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, Barneys, Takashimaya, Gump’s in addition to hundreds of home stores and interior design studios nationally and internationally. Dermond Peterson products have been featured in publications including The New York Times Style magazine, Elle Décor, Metropolitan Home, Interior Design Magazine and Bon Appetit. Peterson also designed and licensed textile products and yardage for The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and other retailors and manufacturers, such as Crate and Barrel and P. Kaufmann Fabrics.

She now lives in Evanston, Illinois and her studio practice is focused on making art.  Her current (mostly) painting project merges a long-standing interest in the relationship between text and visual representation with ideas generated while working with motif, the grid and tessellation in the construction of textile repeats. Her recent abstract grid paintings explore the way formal structural constraint and pleasure in process operate to create meaning in both painted and language-based art forms.