Sæunn Ingibjörg Bjarnadóttir Photo: VÍÆ I
Sæunn Ingibjörg Bjarnadóttir was born on September 14, 1877 in Miðfjörður in Húnavatnssýsla.
Unmarried and childless.
Sæunn’s parents were Bjarni Jónsson and Guðrún Daðadóttir. They lived at Torfastöðir and there Sæunn grew up. She moved to Reykjavík in 1901, and from there to Copenhagen in 1905, where she worked for two years, but in 1907 she enrolled in the Dansk Kunstflidskole. She did well there, received a first prize from the Queen of Denmark and an honorary certificate. She then went home to Iceland, where she received a grant from the national fund to study chemical cleaning in Copenhagen. She stayed there for a year and was the first Icelander to learn this. She went home to Iceland again and worked as a nurse and dry cleaner until 1923, when she moved west across the ocean. She went to Canada and settled in the Lakes settlement (Vatnabyggð) in Saskatchewan and lived in Leslie and later Elfros. She worked there as a nurse until 1956, then moved to Betel in Gimli. Art objects created by her are preserved in the National Museum of Iceland.