A painter known for her detailed and precise still lifes, Carle Shi graduated from the Tianjin Design of Art School in China (1982) and from the Tianjin Academy of Art in China (1988). After immigrating to the United States in 1989, she settled in California. About 1992, she began her professional career as a painter, focusing on still lifes in which she portrayed fruit and used a technique inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes and by a classical approach to composition. Shi moved to New York in 1998, and completed her masters degree at the Graduate School of Figurative Art at the New York Academy of Art (2000). In New York, she added portraits and figural subjects to her repertoire, working in a style that combines classical and contemporary approaches.