Barry Moser was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1940. He was educated at a military academy there, The Baylor School, then at Auburn University and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He did graduate work at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1970. He studied with George Cress, Leonard Baskin, Fred Becker, and Jack Coughlin. His work is represented in numerous collections, museums, and libraries in the United States and abroad, including The National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Metropolitan Museum, The British Museum, The Library of Congress, The National Library of Australia, The London College of Printing, The Pierpont Morgan Library, The Vatican Library, Harvard University, Yale University, Dartmouth College, Cambridge University, the Israel Museum and Princeton University to name a few. Mr. Moser has exhibited internationally in both one-man and group exhibits. He is a member of the Society of Printers, Boston; an Associate of the National Academy of Design elected in 1982 & made full Academician in 1994; and was a founding trustee of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. He was awarded the Doctor of Fine Arts degree by Westfield State College, Westfield, Massachusetts (1999), the Doctor of Humanities degree by Anna Maria College, Paxton, Massachusetts (2001), and the Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Massachusetts (2003).
In addition to being an illustrator he is also a printer, painter, printmaker, designer, author, essayist, and teacher. Mr. Moser frequently lectures and acts as visiting artist and artist in residence at universities and institutions across the country. He is on the faculty of the Illustration Department at the Rhode Island School of Design, was the 1995 Whitney J. Oates Fellow in Humanities at Princeton University, was artist and writer in residence in the Children’s Literature department at Vassar College in 1998, and is currently on the faculty of Smith College where he is Professor in Residence in the Department of Art and serves as Printer to the College. In the fall of 1999 he was artist in residence at Dartmouth College and the University of Iowa. He was the Elliott lecturer in the book arts at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto in the fall of 2000, and in the fall of 2001 was the Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Louisville. Mr. Moser lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, two English mastiffs and four cats. He has three grown daughters and nine grandchildren.
The books Moser has illustrated and/or designed forms a list of over three hundred titles. That list includes the Arion Press Moby-Dick and the University of California Press The Divine Comedy of Dante. Moser's edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, won the National Book Award for design and illustration in 1983 and prompted the poet John Ashbery writing in NEWSWEEK (March 1, 1982), to call Moser's work “never less than dazzling.” Mr. Moser was honored as a “New England Living Treasure” in 1983 by the New England Artist Festival. His Jump, Again! The Further Adventures of Brer Rabbit, was named by The New York Times as one of the “Ten Best Illustrated Children's Books” of 1987 as well as one of Redbook's Best Books for Children for that same year. His collaboration with Cynthia Rylant, Appalachia, the Voices of Sleeping Birds, won the prestigious Boston Globe-Horn Book Award in 1991, and his collaboration with Ken Kesey, Big Double the Bear Meets Little Tricker the Squirrel, was named one of the best books of 1990–1991 by the International Board of Books for Young People of Zurich, Switzerland. His collaboration with his granddaughter, Isabelle Harper, My Dog Rosie was named a Best of the Year by Parents Magazine in 1994. Whistling Dixie, his collaboration with Marcia Vaughn was a 1995 ALA Notable Book, as was his collaboration with Virginia Hamilton, When Birds Could Talk and Bats Could Sing, in 1997. He has won numerous citations and awards of merit from Communication Arts Magazine, Bookbuilders West, The American Association of University Presses, and The American Institute of Graphic Arts. His monumental work on the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible (1999) has been the subject of scores of articles in print, television, and radio as well as the subject of a documentary film called A Thief among the Angels. It was also featured in the only one-man exhibit ever to be mounted at the Library of National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. by a living artist. It was exhibited in the summer and autumn of 2000 at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem as part of an exhibit called "The Bible in the Landscape."
