J.E. Paterak also known as Jeanne, is a studio artist living and working in Portland, Maine. She studied painting and printmaking at Massachusetts College of Art and metal smithing and jewelry at the renown Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. With multiple skills and interests she is a bit of an itinerant maker, strongly aligned with walking and adventuring in the field with fellow avocational & professional botanists and mycologist. Her studies have allowed her to also study at Cooper Union, and in Eastern Europe in the 1980s just ahead of the fall of the Berlin wall. She has both taught and studied at Haystack and Penland. She has exhibited throughout the country over the decades long career but prefers to mostly work and exhibit here in Maine.

Her paintings and jewelry are in numerous private collections throughout the country as well as in public collections most notably at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Both her writing and work have been published in American Craft, Metalsmith Magazine, Art New England, as well as numerous books. She has been awarded grants from Maine Arts Commission, as well as granted residencies at Monson Arts, Haystack, Fiore Center, Bowdoin’s Kent Island Science Station among others.

She is a co-owner with her husband Keith Fitzgerald of Zero Station in Portland. For 26 years Zero Station was independent gallery with a long legacy of innovative programing - In June of 2026 is closing its Bayside location and they will be focused on art presentation with select curating and consulting.