Saint Clair Cemin was born in Cruz Alta, Brazil on September 24, 1951. He spent two years of his childhood in a property in rural area of the country where his father, engineer by profession, tried and failed to engage in agriculture. They there lived on a very primitive way, with no running water and electricity, depending on gas lamps during the night. As a teenager he moved with his family to Sao Paolo and started to show tendencies toward the visual arts.

Cemin also became interested in sculpting as a teenager. Once interested in philosophy and physics, he began to focus his attention on art, drawing and working on illustrations for magazines. Cemin earned his degree at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, from 1975-1978 where he studied printmaking for three years. He moved to New York City shortly after, where he experimented in several fields as a way of earning an income. From 1981 to 1983, Cemin worked as a carpenter, renovating lofts in New York, cabinet making, and finally sculpture. The artist's first exhibited sculpture was The Granny Ashtray, which has been described as an anti-modernist piece.

Throughout the 1980s, Cemin became an integral part of NY's East Village art scene. Some of his works from this era are on permanent exhibition at important institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. After those formative years in NYC Cemin moved to Egypt and then Paris to pursue sculpture in different environments and with different mediums. After 2010 he returned to NY and continues to create sculptural works in his Brooklyn studio.

In 2012 Saint Clair Cemin had a public exhibition of works along Broadway in Manhattan. Of the several works exhibited on Broadway one "vortex" at the corner of 57th street and Broadway, stood some 40 feet tall. Saint Clair Cemin's work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Emily Fisher Landau Collection, Long Island City, NY; Rooseum, Stockholm, Sweden; Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Inhotim, Minas Gerais, Brazil, among many others.

Saint Clair Cemin lives and works in Bejing, Paris and New York.

biography drawn from Wikipedia and other sources.