Ryan S. Brown was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Ryan studied at Brigham Young University, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration in 2002.  In his senior year at BYU, Ryan began studying with William Whitaker, a renowned portrait and figurative painter.  Soon after this, Ryan entered The Florence Academy of Art, where he received his first taste of Academic training.  The organized, intense and concise training of the Florence Academy provided Ryan with what he considers the beginning of his understanding of the craft of art.  Upon his return to Utah from Florence, Ryan began producing work for galleries.  Ryan also began teaching academic principles at BYU, teaching figure drawing, observational and spatial drawing and cast drawing.  Ryan also opened his studio to students, establishing the Classical Drawing Academy in Springville, Utah.  During the three years this Academy was available to students, Ryan saw more than 85 students come through his studio to experience this training.  Ryan also taught part-time at Utah Valley State College and the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art sporadically between 2004 and 2006, culminating in an academic drawing workshop given in 2006.
In January, 2007 Ryan, his wife and three kids moved back to Florence in order to finish his studies at The Florence Academy of Art.
Ryan is living and working again in Utah and has established the Center for Academic Study and Naturalist Painting (CAS).
Ryan was the top award winner of the John F. and Anna Lee Stacey scholarship in 2004.  He also received third place in the Art Renewal Scholarship competition in 2005.  In 2006 Ryan was one of ten artists to be invited by American Artist Magazine to the Forbes Trinchera Ranch for a ten day retreat that was followed by a special article in the magazine and a showing of these select artist’s works at the Forbes Gallery in New York in March, 2007.  Ryan was also accepted into the Hudson River School for Landscape in its inaugural year, which he attended in the summer of 2007, and again in 2008.  In 2007 Ryan also won Fourth Place in the Art Renewal Center Scholarship Competition.  Ryan was featured in the May, 2008 issue of Southwest Art as “A Rising Artist to Watch”.  Ryan won the “Best Painting of the Year” at The Florence Academy of Art in 2008.