Cornelia McSheehy is a professor of Printmaking at RISD and a past recipient of RISD’s John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching. She began teaching at RISD in 1977 and was department head from 1979–90. She earned her BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and her MA in Printmaking from the State University of New York at Albany, where she also taught painting, drawing, lithography and intaglio as well as printmaking in the Continuing Education Division.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in group and solo
exhibitions since 1969 and is included in numerous collections, including the Library of 
Congress. Affiliations include memberships in the Boston Printmakers, the MacDowell Fellows Association, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston and the RISD Museum.

McSheehy earned an NEA Visual Arts Fellowship in Printmaking, a MacDowell Colony Visual Arts Residency Fellowship, a photography collaboration grant sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the
Polaroid Corp., and a RISD/Mellon Foundation faculty grant, among others. She was a printmaking finalist in a program sponsored by the Massachusetts Council for the Arts and worked as chief critic in RISD’s European Honors Program in Rome. She has also received numerous purchase awards in national printmaking and drawing exhibitions.

Her work and printmaking processes are included in The
 Collagraph (Free Press) and Printmaking: Innovative Techniques (Chilton Publishing). She has presented at the annual College Art 
Association Convention lecture series and at numerous symposia, lectures, seminars and
printmaking workshops. She frequently acts as visiting critic at colleges, universities and museums throughout the US and Europe and has been a juror for numerous national and international printmaking, drawing and painting exhibitions, such as Colorprint USA at Texas Tech in Lubbock and the National Print & Drawing Exhibition at
 the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks.