Sean McCarthy (b. 1976 in San Antonio, TX) received a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. He has had solo exhibitions of his paintings and drawings at Fredericks & Freiser and Essex Flowers (where his 2020 exhibition was named a must-see show by the editors of Artforum) in New York, the Palmer Gallery at Vassar College, and Fish Island Gallery in Connecticut, as well as group exhibitions at Marlborough Chelsea and Kate Werble Gallery in New York, One in the Other in London, VOLTA in Basel, Tops Gallery in Memphis, and Ada Gallery in Richmond, among many other venues. His comics and zines have been featured in a global survey of zine culture at Cubitt Gallery in London and the Desert Island Comic Zine Party at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and he received a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Fiction for his work in comics.
McCarthy is Associate Professor of Art at Lehman College of the City University of New York in the Bronx, where he served as chair of the Art Department from 2014 to 2019. He has given lectures and critiques as a visiting artist at Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Fordham University, taught studio art at Pratt Institute and the New York Institute of Technology, and has participated in residencies at Yaddo and the Vermont Studio Center. He has curated exhibitions at Essex Flowers, the Lehman College Art Gallery, NYIT Manhattan and No Globe Exhibition Space in Brooklyn. He is a member of the editorial board of the academic journal Glossator: Theory and Practice of the Commentary, as well as a contributing writer at The Comics Journal. He lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York.