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Judith Schaechter (1961-) is a Philadelphia-based stained glass artist and educator.
Schaechter was born in Gainesville Florida and her family soon relocated to Newton Massachusetts where her father Moselio Schaechter was a microbiology professor at Tufts University. She exhibited artistic talent and imagination that was nurtured at an early age, and Schaechter worked on developing her art in high school. She received her bachelor's degree from Rhode Island School of Design in 1983. During her undergraduate work she discovered the glass program and completed her undergraduate work there.
While her methods of art production may be centuries old, Schaecter infuses contemporary themes in her pieces that resonate with the grotesque imagery that appears in the Medieval and Renaissance motifs that she emulates. In addition to lending her works as cover artwork to literary and music artists, Schaecter also played in bands such as Ken throughout the 1990s and recorded her own music. In this way the punk and D.I.Y. ethos resonates with all of her creative endeavors, despite the fact that her works take many hours to create. Skillful draftsmanship is at the core of her artistic practices and her more recent work incorporates computer illustration as well as animation.
Schaechter served as an adjunct professor in the Crafts Department at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Adjunct Faculty at the New York Academy of Art in New York, New York. She has also taught workshops and classes at Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, Penland School of Crafts, Toyama Institute of Glass (Toyama, Japan) and Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, among others.
An early career milestone was achieved with her stained glass artwork appearing on the cover of The New Yorker in 1993. She showed her work Bigtop Flophouse Bedspins in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Schaechter's artwork is featured in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Hermitage Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Corning Museum of Glass, and the Renwick Gallery, among numerous other public and private collections.