Beckie Kravetz began her sculpture career as a theatrical mask maker. She received her training at the Yale School of Drama, the Centro Maschere e Strutture Gestuali in Italy, the Taller de Madera in Guatemala, and the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, Mexico. In 1988, she became the resident mask maker for the Los Angeles Opera, where she also works as a guest principal makeup artist and assistant wig-master. Her skills have helped transform the faces of dozens of singers, including Placido Domingo, Sir Thomas Allen, Carol Vaness, Samuel Ramey, Richard Bernstein, and Rodney Gilfry. A 1993 exhibition of her masks at Roark Gallery in Los Angeles led to the creation of Beckie’s first series of non-wearable, sculptural masks. Years of working with actors inspired her to explore the mask’s inner surface: the point of transformation between actor and character. Early works using painting and text on the inside of the face evolved into masks containing three-dimensional tableaus, as seen inside the faces of the Sculpted Arias series.      In 1998, the Los Angeles Opera hosted the premiere solo exhibition of Kravetz’s Sculpted Arias at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Select pieces in the series have subsequently been shown at the Metropolitan Opera Gallery, Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson MOCA, and the Seattle Opera Ring gallery. She continues to add to the Sculpted Arias series, including the array of characters from Wagner's Ring Cycle, but her work is neither limited to portrait masks nor to operatic themes. She is currently casting a new series of figures and faces and is creating a contemporary installation group of life-sized ceramic figures interacting with masks. Kravetz has received several grants to fund a public artwork also life-sized, in collaboration with women in a transitional housing facility and the residents of the neighboring community.      In 2001, Beckie Kravetz was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to Spain, to study wood sculpture, ritual masks, and puppets. She has also received grants from the California Arts Council, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and private foundations. Currently represented by the Shidoni Gallery in Santa Fe, and Mountain Shadow Gallery in Tucson, Beckie's sculptures have also been exhibited at the Tucson Museum of Art (Arizona), The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles (solo exhibition), Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, the Jewish Community Museum (San Francisco), the Downey Gallery in Santa Fe (solo exhibition), Lincoln Center Library (NYC), Gallery 10 and Minds Eye Gallery (Scottsdale, AZ), Davis Dominguez, Dinnerware and TDS galleries (Tucson), Walker Gallery (Davis, CA), Mesquite Grove gallery (Patagonia, AZ), and Roark Gallery (Los Angeles). Her theatrical mask work has been seen in numerous opera, regional theater and university productions including Los Angeles Opera, Santa Fe Opera, New York ’s Classic Stage Company, Pan Asian Repertory Theater and Lincoln Center Institute, LA’s Ziggurat Theater and Towne Street Theater, Teatro La Tia Norica and Gran Teatro Falla (Cádiz, Spain), Yale University, Bryn Mawr and Hunter Colleges. She has also created masks for Madonna’s Max Factor Gold international campaign, and the opera-themed Nike and Pepsi commercials featuring Charles Barkley and Michael Jackson. Beckie lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, author and journalist Alan Weisman.      The artist welcomes public and private commissions, including site-specific installations, figures for fountains, architectural elements, and portraiture.