Susan Talbot Hoffmann was born on March 14, 1955, in Thibodaux, Louisiana, the daughter of a Texaco oil field worker and a mother who loved to cook. She was one of four Cajun children born to Joycelyn and John Talbot. Susan loved to sketch the living things around her including her dogs and cats and the children she baby-sat. She attended St. Genevieve Catholic and Thibodaux High schools. She entered Nicholls State University under the High Ability Student Program at the age of 16. She illustrated her parasitology lab manual with organisms she viewed under the microscope. That manual was handed down from student to student. She enrolled as a Chemistry major and graduated magna cum laude in 1976.
      Following graduation, she worked as a Research Assistant for Tulane Medical Center and was accepted into the Clinical Chemistry Program in the Pathology Department of Louisiana State University Medical Center in New Orleans. She would often draw comical figures to illustrate the ideas discussed at classes and seminars she attended. She graduated with a M.S. in Clinical Chemistry in 1979. As a graduate student she was a member of the research team of Dr. Andrew Schally who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1979. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Clinical Chemistry in 1981. Susan received a National Research Award and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda Maryland from 1982 -1986.
      Returning to work at the U.S.-Japan Biomedical Research Laboratories of Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans in 1986 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, she was one of four investigators on a grant to isolate new hormones regulating ovulation. She traveled to Kyoto, Japan to present her research results and took many slides of the gardens there to illustrate her seminars. She would often assist the Japanese fellow's wives in their Ikebana floral arrangements at the laboratory.
      In 1989 she was diagnosed with a large acoustic neuroma requiring emergency brain surgery. The difficult surgery took ten hours. She suffered an epidural hematoma as well as a stroke which required an additional four hours surgery. Susan remained in a deep coma, slowly awakening over the following month. Unable to speak, talk, walk or eat, she remained on Touro Infirmary's Head Injury Rehabilitation Ward for several months and in Speech and Physical Therapy for three years. (www.tbirecovery.org)
    Following her rehabilitation, she began taking art classes at Nicholls State University as therapy. Loving the art course work, she accumulated the credits necessary to receive a B.A. in Art during the ensuing six years, graduating in May of 1999. Susan has had work accepted into local juried art shows in the areas of drawing, painting, design, sculpture and printmaking. She received a first place award for her prints of the Kyoto gardens and for her print of the Star Jasmine and the Fern leaf. She received statewide recognition being mentioned in the spring 2000 issue of Louisiana Life and acceptance of her print of the Magnolia into the Louisiana Archives in Baton Rouge. In April 2001, she had her prints of the Gardenia and Leather-leaf Fern accepted into the national exhibition "Works on Paper 2001" in Houston, Texas. Her chine' colle aquatint print of the "Louisiana Magnolia" was featured in the New Orleans Art Association's 22nd National Juried Art Show. In August 2002, she had a showing at the Art Student's League of New York during the Society of American Graphic Artists' 69th National Exhibition at the Grand Gallery. She was elected to membership in the American Color Print Society after receiving an award in their National Exhibition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her artist's book, "Water My Flowers" was featured in the 1st Annual National Book Arts Show held by Bright Hill Press in Treadwell, New York. In 2003, her print of the Garden District in New Orleans was accepted into the 16th Parkside National Small Print Exhibition in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and her collection of prints titled "Southern Splendor: the Garden District of New Orleans" was catalogued into the Historic New Orleans Collection in 2004. Later, her artist book on the Louisiana swamps was featured in Queensland, Australia, and in an International Exhibition at the San Diego Art Institute Museum of the Living Artist.
      She has been influenced by other artists who fought mental and physical illnesses and turned to nature for inspiration such as Auguste Renoir, Vincent Van Gogh, Georgia O'Keeffe and Charles Demuth. Each year since her recuperation in 1993, she has had a favorite flower painting made into a card which she sends to her friends at Christmas time in celebration. Her senior show titled "Louisiana Rain" included a poem she had written ending with "Life lives and renews itself...and so do I." Her solo show in 2002, included watercolors of locally grown fruits and vegetables and also included an original poem ending with "A rising mist - to heaven born."
   In 2004, a retrospective of her past five years since her graduation was exhibited at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Ending the year, she received the Dorothy and Hugh Hutton Award in Intaglio from the American Color Print Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
     Her website SusanTalbotHoffmann.com was launched the following year, 2005, and offers reproductions and notecards of her etchings and watercolors as well as limited edition prints. In 2006, she debuted at the National Arts Club in New York and received the Jeanne Claire Memorial Award for her etching of "Crawfish Boil Katrina" in Philadelphia given by the American Color Print Society. She also had watercolor paintings of her native Louisiana Iris, done on location in Schriever, accepted into the permanent collection of Thibodaux Regional Medical Center and other "native flowers" in Lafayette General Hospital. Her chine' colle etchings of "native flowers" are at Lafayette City Club as well as soft ground etchings of actual magnolia leaves and flowers at Pilant Court Reporting in Morgan City, Louisiana.
      Susan's most recent work in watercolor using antique roses growing around her home and etchings of famous Louisiana cuisine describing the plight of today's Louisianian was shown at Southdown Plantation in Houma, Louisiana at the end of 2007 and Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, Louisiana in May-June 2007.  This work was also shown at the Masur Museum in Monroe, Louisiana in March-April 2008.   
      Her etching ttitled “Louisiana Cypress Swamp II” was selected among the Top Ten finalists in an international online competition “Curate This” in which artists around the globe were voted upon by a worldwide audience including museum curators and art collectors. The Top Ten were included in an exhibition by BECA Gallery of New Orleans. 
     At the end of 2008, Susan Talbot Hoffmann had the distinction of being one of the first artists to be invited to enjoy representation in one of New Orleans, Louisiana's newest galleries “A Work of Art” on Magazine Street. That gallery has since relocated; Susan now enjoys representation at the gallery's Mississippi location (call 228-896-9640 for directions).  Etching the historic home of Beauvoir, she was the featured artist during December 2009 - February 2010.  In January of 2010, Susan enjoyed the distinction of being one of the inaugural artists when “A Work of Art” opened a location on the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana (call 985-845-9310 for directions).
     She has continued showing at “Art under the Oaks” at E. D. White plantation, and Jubilee: “A Celebration of the Art and Humanities” held locally during April and also Art after Dark held in Houma since their inception. She also continues showing her latest watercolors with the Louisiana Watercolor Society at the Louisiana State Archives in Baton Rouge during the spring. 
      As a member of the American Color Print Society, she shows her current etchings in the National Members’ Exhibition held in Philadelphia annually.  Her most recent New Orleans Garden District etchings (website link) of historic homes were accepted at the Louisiana State University Art Gallery in Baton Rouge and she was also shown at the Southern Open held at the Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, Louisiana in 2009.  These twenty etchings are currently being shown at "A Work of Art" gallery's new Madisonville and the Gulfport locations.

Her goal as an artist is not only therapy for herself, but also to provide the viewer with scenes of nature in all her glory.

...both his eternal power and his divine nature, have been clearly seen;
they are perceived in the things that God has made.
Romans 1: 20