Emily Clarke-Pearson was born in Durham, NC, in 1978. She earned a BFA in painting and installation from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2000 and then moved to Los Angeles to teach as a Teach For America corps member. She taught middle school in the East LA barrio Boyle Heights, where murals, graffiti art, and tags scatter the walls of buildings on every block. Realizing the power of the visual arts in this community, Emily designed, grant-funded, and taught an art program for the overcrowded middle school there. Her own art continued to develop: She began working in mixed media on paper, combining urban images with abstraction to represent the layered experience of the diverse city.

Emily returned to the East Coast in 2002, completing premedical science coursework in Philadelphia before matriculating to Brown Medical School in Providence, RI in 2003. This career shift may seem contradictory: The artist, however, feels that her medical and art work have a symbiotic relationship, as medicine informs art, and creativity inspires her practice of medicine. She organizes shows of medical student art, and helps teach the Art in Medicine elective at Brown Med. She has shown her work on Brown campus, and had her first solo exhibition since college, entitled Life is Not a Bowl of Cherries, at the Arcade Gallery in downtown Providence last winter. In her current work, she abstracts symbols from medical, political, and cultural sources to capture the emotional undertones often unnoticed in America's consumer culture.