Dottie Korn-Davis is a native Southern Californian. Her life changed when she walked into an archaeology class in her junior year at UCLA. Until then she was convinced she would be a foreign correspondent and travel around the world on freighters. Instead, she changed her focus, graduated, became a "shovel bum" and wound up working in the La Brea Tar Pits as a paleo-archaeologist for the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. There she was digging up the fossils that she had played with as a child when the tar pits were just a magical oddity in West Los Angeles. She was affectionately known as "Dottie the Dowser Nose" because of her ability to spot fossils on desert digs.

She then moved to Chicago and was hired by the Academy of Sciences in Lincoln Park to dig up a Mastodon. But the mastodon got bogged down in a bog and she wound up building and painting exhibits at the museum. It was another diversion in her career path... she began to study life drawing with Fred Berger - a member of the famous "Hairy Who" representational artists. She worked with him for 6 years until the climate won and Southern California beckoned. Moving to San Diego, she received her masters degree in studio arts from SDSU and produced large scale highly colorful abstract canvases. However, paleo-archaeologists are often treasure hunters who like to travel and are acutely aware of surface textures. Soon found objects became thematic parts of the paintings as well as different surface textures.

Then she decided to just skip the canvas…. work with the materials….alter them, disguise them and let them evolve a new life and personality. At the same time the travel bug bit hard again and she began a series of adventures in China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Tunisia, Morocco, Peru, and, and in 2004 on public transportation and on foot in the ancient silk road countries of Uzbekistan, Kyrgistan and Tajikistan. She brought back objects, patterns and images which soon found their way into her work.