Jerrold Ballaine, painter, sculptor, and educator, was born in Seattle, Washington on 16 February 1934. He attended the University of Washington in Seattle between 1952 and 1955 and, after serving in the military, he furthered his studies at the Art Center School in Los Angeles between 1958 to 1959. He earned his B.F.A. from the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1959, where he studied under Richard Diebenkorn, and his M.F.A. degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1961.

Ballaine's early interest in Abstract Expressionism in the Bay Area placed him in the burgeoning Funk Art and Bay Area Figurative movements, the latter of which included Diebenkorn, Glenn Wessels, Wayne Thiebaud, Nathan Oliveira, and others who made their mark in the late 1950s and '60s. After his graduation from the San Francisco Art Institute he included landscapes in his oil painting, for which he would become known throughout the Bay Area. However, by the 1990s he had moved away from landscapes and into non-objective abstraction. In the late 1970s, he worked for a time in color lithography, where his work leaned toward Op Art. Since the 1970s he has painted in acrylic and also fabricated sculpture, using clay, plastic and marble.

Ballaine began his teaching career in 1963 when he joined the faculty of the Cornish School of Allied Arts in Seattle. In 1965, he was hired to teach at the University of California, Berkeley, retiring in 1994 as Professor Emeritus. While at Berkeley, he served as Interim Museum Director for the academic year 1975-1976. He is currently a resident of Sonoma County where he continues to paint and sculpt.

His numerous awards and honors include the San Francisco Museum of Drawing and Print Art, Annual Award, 1960; Fourth International Young Artists Exhibition Award Tokyo, Japan, 1967; Summer Faculty Fellowship, University of California at Berkeley, 1969; Creative Arts Institute Grant, University of California, Berkeley, 1971; and the Humanities Research Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley, 1980.

Jerrold Ballaine is represented in the collections of the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth; University Art Museum, University of California Berkeley; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; Logan Museum of Art, Utah; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Oakland Museum of California, California; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; San Jose Museum of Art, California; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; Sebastopol Center for the Arts, California; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Wichita Art Museum, Kansas; and the Swiss State Museum, Zurich, Switzerland.