Nelbert Chouinard

Nelbert Chouinard (born Nelbertina Murphy; 1879–1969) was an American artist who founded the Chouinard Arts Institute in Los Angeles, California. The Institute had a great influence on artists and art education, creating progressive educational pathways that helped incubate artists who, in turn, defined many directions in the arts—from visual art and design, to fashion and costume design, animation and motion pictures. Her partnership with Walt and Roy Disney created the foundation for what is today the California Institute of the Arts.

Education Nelbert Murphy began her art education at Windom Institute in her hometown of Montevideo, Minnesota. She was a 1904 graduate in fine art, from the Pratt Institute in New York.

Career Teaching After graduating from Pratt, she began her teaching career in the Orange, NJ public school system. She spent her summers at home in Minnesota working with the Handicraft Guild in Minneapolis where she taught leather craft art under the guidance of Earnest Batchelder. When her parents relocated from Minnesota to South Pasadena, California, in 1909, Nelbert Murphy joined them and taught at Throop Polytechnic, now Caltech, with Ernest Batchelder. and was renamed California Institute for the Arts (CalArts). The choice of CalArts as a name was intentional, to draw connection to the progressive educational beginnings of the Throop Polytechnic, where Mrs. Chouinard started teaching in California, which had become the California Institute of Technology.

Personal life Nelbert Murphy married Horace "Burt" Chouinard, widower and retired Spanish–American War army chaplain, in 1916. The couple lived briefly in El Paso, Texas and later in Washington, D.C. When Horace Chouinard died of cancer only two years later, Nelbert M. Chouinard moved back to South Pasadena, California where she lived for the rest of her life. She was known thereafter as "Mrs. Chouinard", never remarried, and always wore her wedding ring.