Senitt grew up in
Rochester, New York, and studied in the School of Art and Design at the
Rochester Institute of Technology. Her talents were recognized early through the receipt of the John A. Varney Award in 1964. In 1966, at the age of 21, she won Best Female Artist in the Finger Lakes Exhibit. After her third year at the School of Art and Design, she immigrated to Canada in 1966. She settled in Toronto for the first 9 months and then moved to a school house near Fergus, Ontario. During the late 1960s, she developed a successful painting career in Toronto using the name
Cathy Senitt-Harbison. She showed her work at Pollock Gallery in 1967, where owner
Jack Pollock also represented such artists as
Ken Danby,
David Hockney, and
Willem de Kooning. She continued to be represented there through 1975 and the Merton Gallery from 1977 to 1978. Senitt was awarded her first Canada Council Arts Grant in 1968. Senitt's work was chosen to be part of the "Man and His World" exhibit in the grounds of the 1967
International and Universal Exposition (Expo 67) in Montreal. Senitt was selected to join Canada's pavilion at
Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. featured an uncredited image of a paper mache sculpture Senitt had made of
Pierre Trudeau in the form of a jack-in-the-box. A 1974 feature article in the
Toronto Star painted a rich picture of Senitt's life at the time, showing the schoolhouse she lived in, as well as a photograph of her painting while sitting on the floor. A photograph of her painted bottles states that they sold for $30–50 at the Pollock gallery. and formed Senitt Puppets to manufacture them. They were licensed to Ganz Brothers, and in 1986 to
Coleco for distribution in the US. Her work is known for its creativity and sophisticated use of naive forms. Many of her works incorporate unusual human forms, and various series have focused variously on abstract portraiture, her pet Red Dog, and hybrid human-animal forms reminiscent of
Hieronymous Bosch or
Gauguin.
The Globe and Mail critic Kay Kritzwiser compared Senitt to "...Renaissance painters such as
Grunewald (for whom she admits a worship) and Hieronymous Bosch (who impresses but does not inspire her.)" Senitt currently lives and works in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. == Collections ==