Byron Grush

Byron Grush was born and raised in Naperville, Illinois, just southwest of Chicago. He is a third generation native of that town. His grandfather, Alexander Grush, was a prominent citizen who served as mayor during the depression years of the early 1930s. Mayor Grush ran a soup kitchen and facilitated many WPA projects including the building of Naperville’s Centennial Beach, a converted stone quarry that attracts many new residents. Byron’s father, Byron Senior, was born above the meat market downtown in that city.

Grush studied art and design and taught at The Art Institute of Chicago, creating a course in film animation in the mid-seventies. He later became an Associate Professor at the College of Art at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, Illinois, where he taught in the Electronic Media area. He is the author of a book on hand-drawn animation techniques entitled The Shoestring Animator. He and his wife then moved to New Mexico in the 1990s, and opened an art gallery featuring Outsider and Visionary Art in Santa Fe. They returned to the Midwest to retire in the small town of Delavan, Wisconsin, a place that reminds them of their roots.