Nelbert Chouinard

Nelbert Murphy Chouinard (1879–1969) was one of the most influential art educators of the 20th century and a long-time resident of South Pasadena. She is best known as the founder of the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, which eventually merged with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to become the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), now in Valencia. Chouinard lived for most of her life in a home built by her father, Dr. Lee Murphy. She moved to South Pasadena in 1909 and began her local career teaching alongside a leader of the American Arts & Crafts Movement, Ernest Batchelder, at the Throop Polytechnic Institute (now Caltech) and the Batchelder School of Design.

She was known as part of the Eucalyptus School, painting images of the California landscape alongside Franz Bischoff and William Wendt. By 1921 she founded the Chouinard Arts Institute, which minted a who’s who of innovative and celebrated artists over the next five decades, including Millard Sheets, Edith Head and Ed Ruscha, and whose students’ broke ground and set trends in visual art and design, fashion and costume design, animation and motion pictures. Notably, Walt Disney animators at the time were creating classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi and Fantasia.

The Chouinard property is designated as South Pasadena Cultural Landmark #44, at 1114 Garfield Avenue, South Pasadena, California.