Moira Hahn has exhibited her fine art throughout the US, with a few shows in Japan and Canada, for over two decades. She draws inspiration from various Asian art forms, such as Persian miniatures, Tibetan Thanka paintings, Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, Indian animal drawings, and Chinese guardian figures. In Western art, she is influenced by the documentary art of Explorer/Scientist painters like Martin Johnson Heade, John James Audubon, and Karl Bodmer, which informs her work. She has traveled extensively in the Southwest to study petroglyphs, pictographs, and Native American visual culture.
She admires contemporary artists such as Hilary Brace, Henry Darger, Daniel Du Plessis, Tim Hawkinson, Jess, William Kentridge, Tom Knechtel, Sarah Perry, Ken Price, Hisashi Tenmyouya, and Thomas Woodruff. She holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland, and took advantage of a mobility program to attend California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland, California. She later studied printmaking at Otis Art Institute and pursued other art curricula at California State University, Fullerton, where she earned an MFA in 2000.
In her 20s, Moira Hahn studied experimental animation at CalArts in Valencia, CA, with Jules Engel, and later worked in the animation industry and illustrated books and magazines for The Pushpin Group, an artists' agency in New York. She also studied Japanese art in Hawaii and Japan for several years in the 1980s and later taught studio art at colleges and universities in Southern California.
Moira Hahn comes from a lineage of artists on both sides of her family, with her paternal grandparents having met in a landscape painting class in upstate New York. Despite being named after a British ballerina, her parents didn't discourage her early interest in drawing.
