Beth Zaiken is an award-winning artist whose work spans museum murals, scientific illustrations, coin design, and paleontological reconstructions. Her career has been defined by an uncanny ability to merge artistic talent with scientific accuracy, creating visual tools that educate and inspire audiences across multiple platforms. Her passion for depicting the natural world has led to international recognition in both the museum and numismatic worlds.
Early in life, Beth developed a fascination with all living things-furry, feathery, scaly, creepy, and crawly. This passion led to a persistent love of natural history and biology, a love that now inspires and informs her career as a professional artist, muralist and illustrator.
Beth's interest in art lead her to graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, where she found another passion in reconstructing extinct animals and landscapes from the fossil record, and visualizing civilizations long lost to antiquity. Her skill set was particularly well-suited to scientific illustration and museum work, where her ability to visually interpret complex scientific concepts proved invaluable. In 2009 she joined Blue Rhino Studio in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As lead muralist for this well-known museum design and fabrication firm, Zaiken found her artistic niche creating large-scale murals for museums, zoological parks, and cultural centers worldwide. This position allowed her to work with a small but uniquely talented group of creatives helping to design and build custom art elements for prominent institutions globally.
In 2019, her career expanded in an unexpected direction when she joined the United States Mint's Artistic Infusion Program (AIP). This prestigious program, established in 2003, incorporates artists from various backgrounds and specialties into the coin design process. Her entry into numismatic art represented a new application of her talents for educational visual communication. As Zaiken herself would explain, "I see coins as miniature exhibits you carry in your pocket—all are intended to communicate and educate." This philosophy has guided her approach to coin design, bringing her natural history and museum design sensibility to an entirely different medium and audience.
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Artist Beth Zaiken joins Dr. Moiya to talk about paleoart. Together, they answer questions like: How do artists work with museums to create gorgeous and educational exhibits about the ancient natural world? How has our understanding of the paleo world changed in the last few decades? And how does an artist decide what to include in the scene?
HOSTED by Dr. Moiya McTier (@GoAstroMo), astrophysicist and folklorist
Interview with Scott Persons and Beth Zaiken, Dr. Scott Persons is a paleontologist and professor at the College of Charleston and the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History, and Beth Zaiken is an artist and illustrator who specializes in natural science communication. Both worked on the upcoming book, Mega Rex: A Tyrannosaurus Named Scotty.
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Before coins can make it into the hands of the public or eager numismatists, they must first start at the drawing board. One particular coin designer responsible for several recent popular designs is Beth Zaiken.
In recent years, Beth Zaiken has produced some of the U.S. Mint's most innovative coin designs. Read all about her work in numismatics.
Beth Zaiken, lead muralist at Minneapolis-based design firm Blue Rhino Studio, illuminates her process to accurately depict scenes from history.
“Paleoart reminds us that we have this incredible global history. It's something we all have a claim to, like a fairytale or a legend with larger-than-life characters and millennia-long storylines being written every day by scientists,” Beth says.
Artists use scientific rigor to show how prehistoric life can still be connected to the modern world.