Born in Kansas in 1930, Jill Sutton Davenport moved to California in 1963. A lifelong artist and art enthusiast, she raised a family before turning full-time to her vocation as an artist. In 1976, she graduated from Sonoma State University with a major in Art and a minor in Anthropology and subsequently continued her formal art studies with the California Post-Impressionist, Maury Lapp. During this period, Davenport's work was primarily representational and her favored medium was oil.

In the late 1980's, she became an early exponent of computer-aided design and worked with some of the earliest Mac computers to create pioneering digital artworks. Over the course of a long career, Jill Davenport exhibited widely and with success, including with one-woman shows at the Annex Gallery in Sonoma and at the Ren Brown Gallery in Bodega Bay. She was also instrumental in founding and supporting “Second Place”, a studio and workshop that became an important social hub for her Sonoma community of artists.

Jill Sutton Davenport died in 2019 in Sonoma County.

Source: biography submitted to AskArt.com by Anthony McNaught