About Eileen Christelow

Eileen Christelow was born in Washington, DC to Allan Christelow, a historian and business executive, and Dorothy (Beal) Christelow, an economist. She grew up there and in New Canaan, Connecticut. Her father's job with the Standard Vacuum Oil Company took the family to Japan for a year, when she was 14 years old, and she spent her freshman year of high school at the American School in Japan, in Tokyo. Christelow completed her high school education at Abbot Academy, and graduated in 1965 from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied architecture and learned the basic principles of design which would inform her later work in photography, graphic design, and illustration. She has one sibling, brother Allan Christelow, who is a specialist in the history of Islam in North and West Africa.