Thea Kliros was born in New York City and currently lives there. She studied art at Bennington College in Vermont and at the Yale University School of Art and Design in New Haven, Connecticut. She began her career as a painter and worked on dioramas at the Natural History Museum in Washington, DC.
She then moved to Europe, lived in Spain and Switzerland for a number of years, continued to paint, exhibited, and gained experience as a freelance illustrator.
Her illustrations have been featured in magazines as diverse as The Economist and National Lampoon, but until the late eighties, she concentrated on fashion illustrations. These have appeared in numerous publications including Woman's Wear Daily, Vogue, Seventeen and Good Housekeeping.
Her focus shifted to children's books, and she has illustrated scores of such works, and won a number of awards. One was a Best of the Year from the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia for the Greenwillow Harper Collins publication What Can you Do in The Rain? That book was subsequently published in a Korean edition. Another recent Asian endeavor was the The Rolling Rice Ball produced by Chio Publications in Japan.
As well has having worked for museums and being honored by one, a number feature her books in their stores. Among these is the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
