How to use the Artist Bio Generator
- Fill in the basics. Type your name, choose your Medium, and add a Title only if the default job title doesn’t fit — “botanical illustrator” instead of “watercolor painter”, say. Then enter your Location and two or three concrete subjects under What you make it about, separated by commas. The first subject gets used the most.
- Pick up to three Personality words. They set the voice. Playful brings lines like “Mostly shorebirds. Occasionally tide pools.”; minimal strips things down to “Watercolor. Shorebirds. Tide pools.”; moody and dreamy lean toward half-remembered places.
- Add proof and a next step. List Achievements one per line, choose a Call to action and add your Link. Third person uses sets the pronouns for the portfolio and press versions; name only uses your surname on every mention after the first, the way newspapers do.
- Read through the three tabs. Social has three Instagram options plus TikTok, X & Threads and Bluesky; Etsy shop has a shop title, an announcement and two About texts; Portfolio has third-person, first-person and short press versions. Every card shows a live counter against that platform’s limit, and you can edit the text right in the box.
- Keep the good ones. Press ↻ Another for a fresh take on a single card, or ↻ New versions to reroll everything. Copy grabs one bio, ☆ Save keeps it under Saved bios in this browser, and Copy all gives you every version at once. The page address stores your details, so a bookmarked link brings back the same bios.
What each bio has to do
A bio is read by someone deciding, in a few seconds, whether you are what they were looking for. That person is different on every platform, so one paragraph pasted everywhere does a poor job in most of them.
On Instagram the visitor has usually just seen one post and tapped through. Your name and photo are already on screen, so the 150 characters should answer three things in order: what you make, why they should trust you, and what to do next. TikTok gives you 80 characters — room for one idea and a nudge toward the link. X allows 160, Threads 150 and Bluesky 256, which is enough for a full sentence about your subjects plus a highlight.
Etsy is different because the reader is already shopping. The shop title (55 characters) sits under your shop name and should say what you sell in plain words. The announcement has no published limit, but Etsy shows only the opening and hides the rest behind “read more”, so the first sentence has to carry the news: commissions open, a new print, a holiday cutoff. The About story allows up to 5,000 characters, and that is where buyers who are already interested go to find out who made the thing they are about to buy.
Portfolio and press bios work for people who will publish about you: a gallery labeling a wall, a market printing a program, an editor adding a contributor note. They want third person, a sentence on what you make, one or two verifiable highlights, and nothing they have to rewrite.
Anatomy of a 150-character Instagram bio
Here is a bio built the way the generator builds them, with the character count of each line:
Watercolor painter · shorebirds & tide pools 44
✦ Solo show, Harbor Light Gallery, 2025 39
📍 Portland, Maine 18
Commissions open for March 👇 29
That is 130 characters of text plus three line breaks, 133 in total, which leaves 17 spare. Notice what each line does. The first names a medium and two subjects a stranger can picture. The second is proof with a date, which reads as current. The third tells local buyers and galleries where you are. The last is a single instruction pointing at the link field, because a URL typed into an Instagram bio is not clickable — links go in the separate links field, which takes up to five.
Compare “Artist | Dreamer | Coffee lover ☕” — 33 characters that tell a visitor nothing about the work. The pin and pointing-hand emoji above each count as two characters, which is why the counters here count them that way.
Which voice goes where
| Where it appears | Voice | What usually works |
|---|---|---|
| Instagram, TikTok, X, Threads, Bluesky | First person or no pronoun | 80–256 characters, fragments are fine |
| Etsy About, your website’s About page | First person | 100–250 words with a little story |
| Gallery wall, show catalog, market program | Third person | 50–100 words |
| Press release, magazine contributor note | Third person | 25–60 words |
| Grant or residency application | Whatever the form asks | Their word count, exactly |
If you have never written one, start with the third-person version. It forces plain facts, and the first-person and social versions get easier once those facts are on the page. A bio is about you; the reasoning behind the work belongs in a statement, which the Artist Statement Generator can help you draft.
Tips from practice
Lead with the work, not adjectives about yourself. “Creative soul” and “dreamer” could describe anyone. “Linocut prints of city pigeons” could only describe you, and it is the line people remember when they recommend you to a friend.
Pick subjects narrow enough to picture. “Nature” gives a reader nothing to see; “shorebirds and tide pools” does. If your subjects change every month, name the thread that connects them instead — “small things people step over”.
Date your call to action. “Commissions open for March” tells a visitor the line is current. Change it the day your status changes; a stale “commissions open” costs more goodwill in awkward DMs than leaving it out.
Make every achievement checkable. “Award-winning artist” invites the question “which award?”. “Solo show, Harbor Light Gallery, 2025” answers it. Drop items older than about five years unless they are genuinely big.
Keep a bio file ready. Markets, podcasts and galleries ask for “a short bio and a photo” with a day’s notice. Save the 50-word and 100-word third-person versions, a first-person About and a recent headshot in one folder, and match your posts to it with the Hashtag Generator for Artists when you announce the news.