Most famous daughters get a parent who shows up at premieres. Emily Ratajkowski got a painter who handed her drawing lessons in his own high school classroom and a literature professor who went to communist Poland to dig up her family’s past. That explains a lot about the woman who wrote a bestselling book of essays between campaigns. Here is what is actually on the record about John David Ratajkowski and Kathleen Balgley, and what is not.
Two teachers at San Dieguito
Emily was born in London on June 7, 1991, the only child of two teachers, and grew up in Encinitas, in north San Diego County. Her parents met at San Dieguito Academy, the public high school there: John Ratajkowski taught art, and Kathleen was a graduate student working on her doctorate who also taught at the school, as she told West Cork’s Southern Star in 2022. Emily later went to San Dieguito herself, which means at some point her father was also her art teacher. What strikes me is how unglamorous the origin story is. No agency scout at a mall, just a teachers’ lounge and a lot of grading.
John David Ratajkowski: the painter who never stopped
John grew up in Coronado and taught art in San Diego County for about 40 years. He paints, draws and has made bronze sculpture, and he and Emily talked about all of it in a 2023 conversation for Cultured magazine. She remembered spending hours on the floor of his studio, a few steps from her childhood bedroom, and told him: “I remember you telling me back then that drawing was all about seeing.” His own philosophy was simpler. “I took away the toxic paints, of course,” he said of having a toddler in the studio.
He has not stopped working. His portrait series About Face, drawn from filmed conversations with friends in Bantry and Dublin, had 15 works shown at the Dacia Gallery in New York in 2024, and the Southern Star reported in June 2026 that the show was coming home to Cnoc Buí in Bantry, with a list of sitters now “upwards of 70”. He also made Cow Tuesday, a hand-bound book of drawings of Irish cows, which is exactly the kind of project you can only do once nobody is checking your lesson plans.
Kathleen Balgley: the professor with a family mystery
Kathleen, “Kathy” to family, is a retired professor of literature who taught writing and literature at UCLA and dramatic literature in London. In 1987 she took a Fulbright to teach in Poland, just before the Berlin Wall fell, to trace the roots of her father, who was born there in 1912 and had kept his Jewish identity hidden. The result was her 2022 memoir Letters to My Father: Excavating a Jewish Identity in Poland and Belarus, published by her own small press, Bashert Press. I like that the family’s other author spent years in state archives rather than on a book tour.
What Emily wrote about them in My Body
The old version of this story said her parents simply cheered her on. Emily’s own account, in her 2021 essay collection My Body, is more honest and more interesting. In the opening essay, “Beauty Lessons”, she writes that “it seemed important to them both, especially to my mother, that their daughter be perceived as beautiful,” and that her mother often called her “such a beautiful baby.” The line that stays with me is this one: “When I was special, I felt my parents’ love for me the most.”
It is not a takedown. Reviewers read it as a portrait of a loving, complicated family, and nothing since suggests a rift: in that 2023 Cultured conversation Emily told her father, “I like that neither of you ever stopped.” Famous families are just families with worse privacy, and she chose to publish the uncomfortable part herself.
Bantry, Mallorca and a family of builders
The family has spent summers in Bantry, West Cork, for decades; Kathleen says she and John first went there about 40 years ago. When Emily was small, her father and a friend rebuilt an old ruin in Mallorca, and she remembers helping. In Ireland he taught her a local rock-building technique for a patio. The family that restores houses together apparently also critiques each other’s work: father and daughter told Cultured they still trade opinions on each other’s art.
Emily now: 35, a mother herself
Emily is 35. Her son, Sylvester Apollo Bear, was born in March 2021; she filed for divorce from his father, producer Sebastian Bear-McClard, in 2022. In February 2026 she made her relationship with French director Romain Gavras public on Instagram, and the two arrived together at the Clooney Foundation for Justice’s Albie Awards in London on October 9, 2026. Between the Dior and Gucci shows there is also the podcast she launched in 2022, High Low with EmRata.
Art has followed her into motherhood. Cultured framed it as the core of her parenting, and she put it in one sentence: “Building and making is your way of being close to the people you love.”
My take
The internet likes to imagine supermodels being raised by stage parents. Emily Ratajkowski was raised by two teachers who never stopped making things, and her career looks like it: modeling, yes, but also a book and a habit of saying the uncomfortable part out loud. Her father put it best in Cultured, describing parenting as “more like painting: Give them the tools and see what comes out of it.” Thirty-five years later, the drawing lesson still holds: it was all about seeing.
Sources
- Emily Ratajkowski on Instagram, October 2026
- Instagram: Emily Ratajkowski (@emrata)
- Cultured: Emily Ratajkowski and John David Ratajkowski in conversation (April 2023)
- Emily Ratajkowski, My Body (2021), publisher page
- The Southern Star: Kathleen Balgley on Letters to My Father (October 2022)
- The Southern Star: Bantry faces feature in upcoming exhibit (June 2026)
- West Cork Music: John David Ratajkowski
- The Independent / Yahoo: Emily Ratajkowski on her parents in My Body (October 2021)
- BuzzFeed News: review of My Body (October 2021)
- AOL: Emily Ratajkowski confirms romance with Romain Gavras (February 2026)
- WWD: Emily Ratajkowski at the 2026 Albies
