Jonathan Kingdon was born and grew up in Tanzania and lived and worked in East Africa for many years. He is currently based in Islip, Oxfordshire, and Rome, Italy.
Jonathan is a polymath. Born in 1935 in Tanganyika, he mastered bushcraft and mammalian anatomy from an early age and trained as an artist with his mother, before attending school in England and studying at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford. For seven decades, he has combined careers in painting, sculpture and science writing with his work as a zoologist, evolutionary biologist and biogeographer, particularly of African primates and humans. Jonathan has been a mentor and inspiration to generations of naturalists, conservationists, scientists and artists, both across his beloved Africa and around the world.
His work includes an extraordinary catalogue of insightful books, with his magnum opus, East African Mammals: An Atlas of Evolution in Africa, celebrated as a ‘Leonardo-like exploration of science with an artist’s eye’. Other titles include The Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals, Island Africa, Self-Made Man and Lowly Origin, all lavishly illustrated. Jonathan is a leading authority on African mammals and has written extensively on human origins in Africa.
Although Jonathan has worked as an independent scholar for most of his life, he has held visiting positions at Makerere University in Uganda, Duke University in the US, Stellenbosch University in South Africa, and institutions in Australia, Japan and elsewhere. His larger-than-life paintings and sculptures, inspired by natural history, have been widely exhibited, and the influence of Africa can be seen throughout his work.
Jonathan was awarded the Zoological Society of London’s Silver Medal in 1993 and the Royal Geographical Society’s Cherry Kearton Medal and Award in 1998. He is also a contributor to The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing.
