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Kyra Markham (born Elaine Hyman, 1891–1967) was an actress, figurative painter and printmaker. Markham was briefly married to the architect Lloyd Wright, and five years later, married the scenographer David Stoner Gaither. She worked for the Federal Arts Project, creating works of social realism that documented American life in the 1930s. During World War II, her art was focused on the propaganda effort against the Nazis. Markham was born Elaine Hyman in Chicago, Illinois. She studied drawing at the Chicago Art Institute from 1907 to 1909, and subsequently worked as a muralist and printmaker. In addition to her work as an artist, Markham was an accomplished actress. She appeared with the Chicago Little Theater from 1909 to the 1920s, with the Provincetown Players from 1916, and in movies in Los Angeles. She lived with the author and playwright Theodore Dreiser in Greenwich Village from 1914-1916, helping him with his writing, editing, and typing. Through Dreiser she became acquainted with H.L Mencken, Edgar Lee Masters, and other writers. Due to Dreiser’s womanizing tendencies, Markham left him in 1916 and moved to Provincetown to escape his desperate pleas of reconciliation. While there, Markham continued acting alongside George Cram Cook, Susan Giaspell, and Eugene O’Neill, who founded the Provincetown Playhouse. During this early stage, Markham supported herself by making bookjackets and illustrations, and later working as an art director for film companies like Fox and Metro. In 1922 she married the architect Lloyd Wright and briefly had Frank Lloyd Wright as a father-in-law. In 1927, she married David Gaither and collaborated with him on the set design for a children's play, The Forest Ring, staged at the Roerich Museum Theatre in 1930. Gaither encouraged Markham to pursue "her first love, painting." Markham returned to the Art Students League in New York City in 1930, where she studied with Alexander Abels. Before the stock market crash, Markham was a successful bathroom muralist.
