Ray Troll

From his tree lined studio, high on a hill above the Tongass Narrows in rain-swept Ketchikan Alaska, Ray Troll draws & paints fishy images that migrate into museums, books and magazines and onto shirts sold around the planet. Basing his quirky images on the latest scientific discoveries, Ray brings a street-smart sensibility to the worlds of ichthyology & paleontology.

Ray moved to Alaska in 1983 to spend a summer helping his sister Kate start a seafood retail store. The fish store is long gone but Ray is not.

Ray earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bethany College in Kansas in 1977 and an MFA in studio arts from Washington State University in 1981. In 2008 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the University of Alaska Southeast. In 2007 he was given a gold medal for ‘distinction in the natural history arts’ by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and in 2006 was given the Alaska Governor’s award for the arts. In 2011 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship along with Dr. Kirk Johnson for their new book project Cruisin' the Eternal Coastline: West Coast Fossils from Baja to Barrow. A month after that Ray was also given the Rasmuson Distinguished Artist Award. In 2014 the Alaska SeaLife Center presented him its Ocean Ambassador award.

Troll’s unique blend of art and science culminated in his traveling exhibit, “Dancing to the Fossil Record,” a major show that opened at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco in 1995. Ray followed that tour a few years later with “Sharkabet, a Sea of Sharks from A to Z”. Venues included the Science Museum of Minnesota , the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, the Alaska State Museum and the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. Ray went on to act as the art director for the Miami Museum of Science’s “Amazon Voyage” traveling exhibit and now has another touring show based on his book Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway with Dr. Kirk Johnson. He has illustrated and co-authored eleven books over the course of his career.

He has appeared on the Discovery Channel, lectured at Cornell, Harvard and Yale, shown work at the Smithsonian and has even had two fish named after him: a New Zealand species of ratfish called Hydrolagus trolli and a prehistoric genus of Italian herring called Trollichthys.

He and his wife Michelle run the Soho Coho gallery in Ketchikan situated in an historic house of ill-repute located on a salmon spawning stream.