Micah Shull

Micah Shull is a painter, draftsman, data scientist, and AI systems designer whose work moves between visual art and analytical thinking.

He earned a B.A. in Fine Art from San Francisco State University in 1996, concentrating in drawing and painting and studying with artists including Robert Bechtle, a leading figure of Bay Area Photorealism. After graduating, Shull left his job as a cook to paint full time before moving to Italy, where he spent two years making and selling artwork while studying the history of European art firsthand in museums, churches, cities, and archaeological sites. He lived in Rome and the Cinque Terre and traveled throughout Italy, from Florence, Milan, and Venice to the Alps, Sicily, and the island of Lipari.

After returning to San Francisco, he continued studying figure drawing, painting, and printmaking at Fort Mason, eventually purchasing an etching press and producing his own prints. Alongside art, travel, surfing, cycling, snowboarding, and other physically immersive pursuits became recurring parts of his life and continue to shape his interest in freedom, risk, identity, desire, and the ways people change in response to different environments.

Shull later returned to San Francisco State University, where he earned a second bachelor’s degree, double majoring in Data Science and Finance. He went on to spend roughly a decade working as a data scientist, with experience spanning statistical analysis, machine learning, and predictive modeling for technology companies, including work on battery systems. He lived and worked in San Francisco, Hawaii, Florida, and Colorado during this period, while continuing to draw and eventually returning seriously to painting.

Today, Shull brings his artistic and analytical practices into closer conversation. His paintings and drawings explore identity, performance, desire, contradiction, and the unstable boundary between the private self and the public image. In parallel, his work in data science and artificial intelligence focuses on AI decision systems: orchestrating data, AI outputs, and business signals into clearer, more accountable decisions.

Rather than treating art and technology as separate careers, Shull increasingly sees them as two ways of investigating similar problems—how complex information becomes an image, a pattern, a judgment, or a story about what is true.

He lives and works in Gainesville, Florida.