Born in Kansas in 1928, Virgil Burnett was an author, illustrator, and instructor whose work has been widely published in North America and Europe. He received his undergraduate education at Columbia University in New York, where he studied with Edward Melcarth, a Social Realist painter. In 1950, he was drafted, trained as a combat engineer, and sent to Europe where he served for two years in a propaganda company as an artist-illustrator. After his military service, he attended graduate school at Berkeley, taking a master's degree in Art History. When a Fulbright scholarship took Burnett to Paris in 1956, he encountered other expat artists including David Hill, whom he remained close friends with until Hill's death in 1977. Burnett also met Maurice Darantiere, a French publisher who made him aware of the expressive possibilities of the book arts. By 1960, he was working primarily as an illustrator. In the 1970s, he began as a professor in the Fine Arts department at the University of Waterloo. Burnett died in 2012

The daughter of academic parents, Nancy-Lou Patterson was born in 1929 in Worcester, Mass. She received her BA in Fine Arts from the University of Washington in 1951, afterwards working for two years as a scientific illustrator at the University of Kansas and at the Smithsonian and then for nine years as a lecturer at Seattle University.

In 1962 she moved to the Waterloo Region with her husband, Dr. E Palmer Patterson, who was to teach at the University of Waterloo. In addition to her position as Director of Art and Curator of the University's art gallery, in 1966 Professor Patterson taught the University of Waterloo's first Fine Arts course, and in 1968 she founded the Department of Fine Arts, twice serving as Department Chair.

As a scholar Nancy-Lou Patterson is well known for her writings in the area of mythopoeic art and literature, with particular focus on the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, Charles Williams and Dorothy L. Sayers. She has written extensively on the traditional arts of Swiss German and Dutch-German Mennonites of Waterloo County, and also on the art of Native Canadians. Her work includes both book and exhibition reviews, and exhibition catalogues. She has published both poetry and fiction, including her three novels Apple Staff and Silver Crown (1985), The Painted Hallway (1992), and Barricade Summer (1996). Nancy-Lou Patterson's artistic career began in 1953 when she created a mural for an Anglican Church in Kansas, and includes a series of stained glass windows designed in 1964 for Conrad Grebel Chapel at the University of Waterloo. Her liturgical commissions have involved work in textiles, stained glass, wood, metal, terra cotta, and calligraphy.

In 1993 Nancy-Lou Patterson was named "Distinguished Professor Emerita" by the University of Waterloo, and in the same year received an honorary doctor of letters degree from Wilfrid Laurier University in recognition of "a life dedicated to expression."

Patterson died in Kitchener on October 15, 2018.