Katy Schimert received her BA from the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts) in 1985 and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 1989. She began making ceramic sculpture in 1992 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she taught sculpture, drawing and photography.

Schimert has been the focus of solo exhibitions at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst (2014), David Zwirner, New York (2006), The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (1999) and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1997). Her work has been included in significant group exhibitions at BAM Brooklyn Academy of Art (2010), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2007), Aspen Art Museum (2007), the 1997 Whitney Biennial and the 1996 Sao Paulo Biennial.

Before joining the staff at RISD, Schimert was a lecturer at Yale University and UCSB, and adjunct professor and sculpture department coordinator at New York University and visiting professor of sculpture at both Harvard University and New York University. In spring 2011 she taught drawing in RISD’s Experimental and Foundation Studies division.