Saint Clair Cemin was born in Cruz Alta, Brazil on September 24, 1951. He spent two years of his childhood in a property in rural area of the country where his father, engineer by profession, tried and failed to engage in agriculture. They there lived on a very primitive way, with no running water and electricity, depending on gas lamps during the night. As a teenager he moved with his family to Sao Paolo and started to show tendencies toward the liberal arts.

After some time, Cemin, who had first been interested in philosophy and physics, began to focus his attention on sculpture and drawing, working on illustrations for magazines. In 1975 he was accepted into the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, where he studied printmaking for three years. He moved to New York City shortly after, supporting himself as a carpenter, renovating lofts in New York and designing and building custom cabinets. This experience further developed his love of sculpture, and his first exhibited three-dimensional piece was The Granny Ashtray, which has been described as an anti-modernist piece.

Throughout the 1980s, Cemin became an integral part of NY's East Village art scene. Some of his works from this era are on permanent exhibition at important institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. After those formative years in NYC Cemin moved to Egypt and then Paris to pursue sculpture in different environments and with different mediums. After 2010 he returned to the Manhattan.

In 2012 Saint Clair Cemin had a public exhibition of works along Broadway in Manhattan. Of the several works exhibited on Broadway one "vortex" at the corner of 57th street and Broadway, stood some 40 feet tall. Saint Clair Cemin's work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Emily Fisher Landau Collection, Long Island City, NY; Rooseum, Stockholm, Sweden; Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Inhotim, Minas Gerais, Brazil, among many others.

Saint Clair Cemin lives and works in Bejing, Paris and New York.

Biography drawn from Wikipedia and other sources.