Erin’s work was recently featured in a solo show at The Carmel Art Association – The Coast. In January, 2026, along with her daughter, Emily Birmingham, Erin kicked off her Blanket the World with Love project at Vogue Knitting Live in Time Square, New York City. Recently Erin culminated forty years of research with the publication of the biography of her great-great-grandmother, Jane Gallatin Powers – California Modernist.
Erin’s work was recently featured in two museum exhibitions, Color Duets at the Monterey Museum of Art a two person show with her uncle, Kaffe Fassett and California Atmosphere at the Morris Graves Museum of Art.
Born in Big Sur, California in 1963, Erin is an award-winning writer, painter, and teacher with deep roots in the California arts community. For over 30 years, she has taught arts, crafts, and creative writing to children and adults. She co-founded the nonprofit arts education organization Big Sur Arts Initiative in 1998 to provide arts and cultural opportunities to local children and their families.
In 2001, Erin was honored to serve as the first American artist-in-residence of the Hamada International Children’s Art Museum, Hamada, Japan.
In 2008, after almost a decade of nonprofit work, Erin and her husband Tom Birmingham opened Studio One – Big Sur in Monterey’s historic Doud House, offering workshops, art exhibitions, and a space for local arts groups to meet. In 2011 the Museum of Monterey presented a special exhibition, “Cultivating Creativity” featuring Erin’s Doud House paintings.
In 2009, Erin and Tom were honored by the Arts Council for Monterey County as “Champions of the Arts” for their service to the community. In 2010 the couple launched a nationwide arts education tour visiting 17 cities over 9 weeks. They staged art shows, held workshops, and taught free art programs to children and their families.
Erin credits her deep familial roots in the arts for her on-going work today. Her maternal grandparents Lolly and Bill Fassett built Big Sur’s famed Nepenthe Restaurant, a mecca for artist, poets, writers, and bohemians since opening day in 1949. Erin’s great-great-grandmother was Jane Gallatin Powers, a Modernist painter and the “spiritual god mother” of the art colony in Carmel-by-the-Sea.
Erin is on the creative arts faculty for Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, and teaches workshops throughout the United States, Mexico, Italy, and online. In addition to Color Duets – Kaffe Fassett | Erin Lee Gafill and Jane Gallatin Powers – a California Modernist, she is the author of the inspirational memoir Drinking From a Cold Spring, a Little Book of Hope.