Paul Karlstrom is an American art specialist and cultural biographer who received his B.A. in English literature from Stanford and his M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from UCLA. For thirty years the West Coast Regional Director of the Archives of American Art, Karlstrom maintains his long art-world association through extensive writing and interviewing. He has conducted hundreds of interviews with artists ranging from John McLaughlin, Helen Lundeberg, Beatrice Wood, and George Herms to Ed Ruscha, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, and Nathan Oliveira for the Smithsonian’s research collections. Editor of On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900-1950, he is author of the forthcoming (January 2012) biography of legendary modernist art historian and museum director Peter Selz. His current projects include the biographical chapter for a Hassel Smith monograph and an interview series devoted to Bruce Conner’s life and times.