Allyson Strafella was born in Brooklyn (NY) in 1969. She lives and works in Hudson, New York.

Allyson Strafella has been working with a typewriter, making drawings since the early nineties. With patience, she finds the edge of form and formlessness, made and un-made. She has developed a drawing language that is “written” by type, and a written language drawn as mark and form. Her drawings are made by using a single punctuation mark. Her typing is like the “rhythm of the passing of time”, and creates a sort of “prayer flags” fraying into the weather. By marking sheets of paper, individual marks into densely concentrated compositions, abstract forms appear in relation to landscapes, fields and the changing of seasons.

Her work has been exhibited internationally; recent exhibitions include Rock me baby, CAC Centre Art Contemporain Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland (2020); New Typographics: Typewriter Art as Print, The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA (2019); Allyson Strafella. wander, Sleeper, Edinburgh, Scotland (2018); Spatial Flux: Contemporary Drawings from the JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey Collection, Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO (2018).

Strafella is represented in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT, among other private and public collections.

She was a Workspace Program artist-in-residence at Dieu Donné in 2007 and has held residencies at MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH (2002); Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2001); Skowhegan School of Art, ME (1995).

Strafella is a Guggenheim fellow and a Pollock‑Krasner Foundation recipient.