Biography

Eleanor Scott Meyers (1940-) was raised by parents who came from pioneer families that settled in Kansas soon after statehood and the end of the Civil War. Her love for the hills and river valleys along with the wide prairies and big skies of her eastern Kansas upbringing now provide settings for her short stories and novels along with images for landscape paintings in Eleanor's On the Road Art Studio in Claremont, California

Ms. Meyers began her teaching career in the elementary schools of Florida in 1961 and then in New Mexico. After moving back to Kansas in the late 1960s, and raising her children there, she returned to the university, first at Yale to study religion and the arts, and then to the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she completed her Ph.D. in sociology. Teaching appointments in graduate education took her to New York City and Union Theological Seminary where she taught sociology of religion and various aspects of culture related to religion--race, gender, sexual identity, politics and organized religion--and eventually to Berkeley, California where she was the first woman president of Pacific School of Religion. Years later Dr. Meyers retired from The Fielding Institute of Santa Barbara, CA where she was dean of faculty and headed one of the first, groundbreaking, fully accredited, non-campused Ph.D. programs in the U.S.

Eleanor's children live in Wisconsin. An avid camper, she has followed almost every back road leading from California to Wisconsin and back, in order to partake of the joy, not only of being on the road with paint brushes in hand, but of being with her family in their Wisconsin homes.

In retirement Eleanor continued her studies as a student in the Art Studio Program at the University of New Mexico, Taos Branch, for several semesters. Today she calls herself a working artist, painting and writing in her California studio and home . . . and is teaching watercolor and oil painting in two Claremont retirement communities.