He was working as a software engineer when he began painting in 1994, self-taught, at the kitchen table of his apartment on Columbia Road in Adams Morgan. Within a year he was selling paintings at the Georgetown Flea Market and on the internet. In 2001 the Corcoran showed him in “Life’s Little Traumas,” a solo show in its “White Walls” gallery. That year he also met fellow Washington, DC painter Dana Ellyn at one of his solo shows; they have painted and shown together ever since, and today they work side by side downtown.
His DC record includes First Place at the 2003 Adams Morgan Juried Arts Festival, a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities FY2014 Artist Fellowship, Hill Center solo and two-person shows on Capitol Hill (2017–2019), years of Artomatic, a CreativeMornings/DC talk at Sixth & I (2019), and seventeen Transformer benefit auctions since 2007, with his eighteenth in November 2026.
On January 2, 2016 The Washington Post ran Debra Bruno’s feature “The saga of Matt Sesow: How a one-handed artist is seizing D.C.’s art world.” He still paints nearly every day, now at 916 G Street NW, five blocks from the White House.
