Allison B. Cooke was born in Midwest City, Oklahoma. She spent most of her childhood living on the east coast before moving to Wisconsin in 1970. Allison holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Art Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Drawing and Painting from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee.
Since 2006, Allison has been Director and Visiting Faculty for a summer study abroad program, offered through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, at the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy. In the summer of 2016, she will be teaching an On-Site (plein air) acrylic painting class in varying locations throughout Florence.
Throughout her thirty-year teaching career at the college level, Allison taught myriad drawing and painting studio courses at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and, beginning in 2000, in the Department of Art and Design housed in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is now painting full time and works out of two studios. Allison paints both in a well-seasoned attic in their old Victorian home, and most often, in a spacious studio within a commercial building in the Lincoln Warehouse in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Allison has an extensive national exhibition record spanning over three decades. She is in permanent art collections in Germany, Japan, India and Ireland. She was recently invited to join an international group of artists in a collaborative traveling exhibition project called The Drawing Box and exhibited her mixed media drawings with these artists in Ireland, Italy, Malaysia and the Philippines. In December 2015, Allison participated in an international group invitational painting exhibition called Kunst is/Art is in Kunstraum, Germany.