Scott Noel was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1955. He completed undergraduate study at Washington University in St. Louis and moved to Philadelphia in 1978 where he has continued to live, paint, and teach for the past forty-one years.
His first important solo exhibition was in the Fleisher Challenge Series in 1980. Since then he has mounted over forty major shows, seventeen in Philadelphia, two in New York and at university galleries around the United States, most recently at Hollins University, Rider University and UNC Greensboro. Noel is represented by the Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia and is included in numerous private, public and corporate collections including the Museum of the Pennsylvania Academy, the Woodmere Art Museum, the Arkansas Art Center and the Pennsylvainia Covention Center.
Noel has written widely about fellow painters including catalogue essays on Larry Day, Lennart Anderson, Ben Kamihira, Rose Naftulin and Sangram Majumdar. He has assembled seven exhibitions, most recently “Observation and Invention, The Space of Desire” for the Pennsylvania Academy’s museum and “The Nude, Mirror of Desire,” for the Wayne Art Center, co-curated with Paul DuSold. Noel has received fellowships from the Cité Internationale des Art, Paris, the Independence Foundation, and the Bader Fund.
Noel has taught in Philadelphia at The University of the Arts, Arcadia University, Community College of Philadelphia, and beginning in 1996, at the Pennsylvania Academy, where he teaches drawing and painting in the undergraduate and graduate programs. He currently lives in the Roxborough section of the city with his wife Jan and Courtney, the Siberian Husky.