Jason Bard Yarmosky isn't new to the art world, but 2026 has introduced him to a much bigger audience, thanks to his very public relationship with actress Katie Holmes.
Long before any of that, though, he'd already built a name for himself as a figurative painter, working through themes like aging, memory, identity, and time. His "Elder Kinder" series, built around portraits of his own grandparents, is probably the project that's defined his career more than anything else.
Now that he and Holmes are together, he's getting pulled into a spotlight he never really had before. They've been showing up at events together, and Holmes even posted a birthday tribute to him on social media, which for someone who tends to keep her relationships fairly private said a lot on its own.
Still, whatever attention comes with dating a famous actress, Yarmosky's actual work hasn't changed. He's still the same painter digging into the same questions: what it means to grow older, what gets lost and what stays, and how much beauty and vulnerability there is in an ordinary human life.
Who Is Jason Bard Yarmosky? Inside the Artist Katie Holmes Is Dating
A few months ago, nobody outside the art world had any reason to know the name Jason Bard Yarmosky. Now it's one of the more Googled names in the entertainment world, mostly because he keeps turning up next to Katie Holmes at galas, screenings, and dinners across the Hamptons.
Yarmosky is a New York-based painter, 39 as of September 1. Art wasn't something he stumbled into as an adult; he grew up around it. Several people in his family are working artists, so painting and drawing were simply part of the household, not a hobby he picked up later. That upbringing seems to explain a lot about how his career has unfolded: steady, personal, built around a handful of ideas he's clearly still working through rather than chasing whatever's trendy.
He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan in 2010 and didn't waste much time getting his work in front of people, exhibiting since 2011. Over the past decade-plus, his paintings have made their way into museum collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, which is no small thing for an artist who's still relatively early in his career.
What tends to get people's attention isn't just his technique, though. It's what he paints. Yarmosky keeps coming back to aging, memory, and the passage of time. He's said in interviews that these themes grabbed him as a kid, long before he had any formal training to actually paint them. Artists who latch onto an idea that early tend to stick with it, and that seems to be exactly what's happened here.
Outside the studio, he's based in New York City, which lines up conveniently with Holmes' own home base. People who've seen the two of them together at events describe him as easygoing, comfortable in a room full of Holmes' friends (Naomi Watts, Christie Brinkley, and the like) without trying too hard to be noticed.
As for how they met: reportedly at a Tribeca Film Festival dinner back in June 2026. It stayed quiet for a few weeks before their first public sighting in July, and things moved fairly openly from there.
One thing that keeps coming up from people who've seen them together is how relaxed they look. Sources describe him leaning in to talk quietly with her rather than performing for the cameras, which tracks with the general read on him as someone who's used to observing quietly and putting what he notices onto canvas, not someone hunting for a spotlight.
It's also worth saying what he isn't. He's not a musician, not a chef, not someone who already had a public-facing career before this. His world has been galleries and studios, so this sudden visibility is new territory for him too. Whether he leans into it or backs away from it is still an open question. For now he seems to be taking it in stride.
For Holmes, who's kept most of her personal life fairly private for years, publicly posting a birthday tribute to him on Instagram in September was a notable move. It read as more openly affectionate than anything she's shared about a relationship since her divorce from Tom Cruise.
Strip away the tabloid angle, though, and what's left is a working artist with more than a decade of exhibitions, a clear point of view, and real museum credentials. Someone who built a career quietly, long before anyone was searching his name because of who he's dating.
The Art Itself: Aging, Memory, and Why It's Not as Grim as It Sounds
Before Yarmosky's name meant anything to entertainment reporters, it meant something in gallery listings. His career has been building steadily since 2011, and it holds up on its own, separate from whoever he's dating.
His work returns again and again to aging, not aging as decline, but as something worth looking at closely, even with humor. His portraits often focus on older subjects, and he paints wrinkles, posture, and expression with a kind of care that avoids turning into sentimentality. Instead of softening age or treating it as something to disguise, he gives it the same attention most painters reserve for youth.
Time and memory run alongside that. These aren't ideas he's layering onto finished paintings after the fact. He's talked about being drawn to them since childhood, well before he had the skills to express them. That kind of early, personal pull tends to give an artist's work some staying power, since it's not reacting to a trend, just working through something that's actually his.
Critics have pointed to costume and domestic interiors as recurring devices in his paintings, subjects placed in homes surrounded by objects and clothes that suggest decades of a life already lived. There's a storytelling quality to it, almost like each canvas is a frozen scene from a longer narrative. Clothing in particular carries a lot of weight in his compositions, hinting at performance, identity, or nostalgia depending on how it's used.
Given how heavy his subject matter can get (aging, loss, mortality), it would be easy for the work to tip into something overly somber. It's been noted, though, that his paintings hold onto a sense of humor and imagination even while sitting with those themes, which is a harder balance to strike than it sounds.
His exhibition record backs up how seriously he's taken this. Regular shows since 2011 aren't the résumé of someone treating art as a side project. It's over a decade of consistent, committed work. His pieces have shown up at spaces like the Bunker Art Space in West Palm Beach (a 2022 exhibition) and landed in museum collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, a distinction that matters, since museum acquisition signals a different level of curatorial confidence than a gallery show that comes and goes.
He trained at the School of Visual Arts, which has a solid reputation for turning out working artists across disciplines, and being based in Manhattan afterward kept him embedded in the city's gallery scene. That's more or less exactly what happened.
None of this is a rebrand. He's the same artist, working the same themes he's spent over a decade exploring. The only real change is that more people are paying attention now, many of them discovering the paintings because of his relationship rather than the other way around. That's not necessarily a bad thing for a working artist; wider visibility tends to bring bigger audiences and more collector interest. Whether he leans into that or keeps things low-key is something that'll probably become clearer as the relationship continues to play out.
What stands out most, though, is how consistent his vision has stayed. Aging, memory, time, costume, and domestic life: these aren't easy themes to sustain over a decade without repeating yourself, and by most accounts his work keeps evolving inside that framework instead of just circling the same ideas.
Katie Holmes' Dating History, From Tom Cruise to Now
Holmes has spent close to two decades in the public eye, and her relationships have often drawn nearly as much attention as her acting. With Yarmosky now in the picture, it's worth looking back at what came before and how her approach to dating publicly has changed over time.
The most well-known chapter is obviously her marriage to Tom Cruise. They married in 2006 after a courtship that moved fast and generated enormous media coverage: the engagement, the wedding, and the birth of their daughter Suri (now 20) all played out publicly. The marriage ended in divorce in 2012, and the split became its own story, largely because of how quickly and quietly Holmes wrapped it up compared to how public everything leading up to it had been. Since then, she's kept custody and co-parenting details about Suri almost entirely out of view, part of a broader pivot toward privacy that's defined her personal life ever since.
After the divorce, she was linked to Jamie Foxx. They dated for several years, mostly out of public view at first, becoming more visible later on. Reports point to a split around 2019. Compared to the Cruise marriage, this relationship got far less media access, which fits the more guarded approach she'd adopted by then.
Next came a relationship with New York chef Emilio Vitolo Jr., which drew some attention mostly because of its low-key, restaurant-world backdrop, a contrast to her earlier Hollywood-centric romance. That one ended too, without much public explanation.
In 2022, she was linked to Bobby Wooten III, a bassist known for Broadway work on shows like Moulin Rouge! and American Utopia, plus touring credits with artists including Carly Rae Jepsen. They were first spotted together that April, with speculation picking up after they were seen with Holmes' mother in New York. By May they'd made their first public appearance together at the Moth Ball's 25th anniversary gala, and the following month walked the red carpet at Tribeca for Alone Together, a film Holmes wrote, directed, and starred in. That relationship lasted under a year.
Which brings things to Yarmosky. Compared to her last few relationships, this one has had a noticeably different pace. They reportedly met at a Tribeca dinner in June 2026, and by July were spotted holding hands at a Hamptons screening. Later that month came a Ferragamo event in matching navy outfits, one of their first real joint appearances. August brought a red carpet debut at the Guild Hall Summer Gala, followed by the Michael Kors 45th anniversary dinner. By September, Holmes was publicly marking his birthday on Instagram with a noticeably affectionate post, a bigger public gesture than she's made for a relationship since the Cruise years.
A pattern emerges looking across all of this: Holmes tends to gravitate toward men working outside mainstream Hollywood, a chef, a Broadway musician, or now a painter. She's also grown increasingly careful about what she shares publicly, at least until a relationship feels solid enough to acknowledge. The Yarmosky birthday post is about as openly affectionate as she's been in years, which suggests this one might be carrying a different kind of confidence than what came before it.
How Did the Relationship Go From Private to Very Public?
It didn't start as tabloid material. Holmes and Yarmosky reportedly met in June 2026 at a Tribeca Film Festival dinner, no red carpet, no paparazzi, just an industry dinner of the kind that happens constantly without turning into anything. For a few weeks, almost nobody knew.
That changed on July 10, when the two were spotted at a screening of Olivia Wilde's film *The Invite* at the Regal in East Hampton, holding hands on the way in. A source at the screening told *People* the pair seemed completely at ease together. Yarmosky reportedly leaned in to talk to her throughout the film while she laughed and rested her head on his shoulder at one point. They stopped for a photo in front of the movie poster and later showed up at an afterparty at The Boat House, chatting with friends rather than drawing attention to themselves. A real date, clearly, just not one of them was rushing to announce.
Two weeks later, on July 24, they attended a Ferragamo event at Topping Rose House in Bridgehampton, the first time they showed up somewhere unmistakably as a couple. They even coordinated outfits in shades of navy: Holmes in a sheer button-down and metallic fringe skirt with an orange bag, and Yarmosky in a matching navy sweater and trousers. When *Elle* asked about the matching colors afterward, Holmes brushed it off, saying they just happen to like the same things, a small comment, but one that suggested she wasn't particularly bothered by people noticing.
August 7 is generally treated as the moment things went fully official. At the 2026 Guild Hall Summer Gala in East Hampton, honoring Andrea Grover, they posed together on an actual red carpet for the first time. Holmes wore a strapless ivory Fforme gown (the label's Paloma Dress) with a pink Tory Burch bag and snakeskin heels she eventually ditched to go barefoot; Yarmosky kept it simple in all black. Photos from that night, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her, read as genuinely affectionate rather than staged.
About two weeks after that, on August 20, they turned up at Michael Kors' 45th anniversary dinner at Swifty's in East Hampton, notable mainly because it put Yarmosky directly inside Holmes' existing social circle, alongside guests like Naomi Watts and Christie Brinkley. Holmes wore a royal purple dress with red heels; Yarmosky again kept it simple in black. Photos from the night, some posted by Kors himself and reshared by Holmes, showed the two clearly comfortable being seen together among her friends.
The clearest signal so far came on September 1, when Holmes posted a birthday tribute to Yarmosky marking his 39th. Nothing overly dramatic about it: a photo of the two of them leaning in together holding microphones during what looked like karaoke, plus a shot of a lit birthday cake, captioned simply calling him the best of the best. Her Instagram Stories showed him blowing out candles while people cheered, followed by the two of them hugging. He reposted it on his own account, which made it feel like the first time both of them were claiming the relationship publicly on their own terms, rather than leaving it to photographers.
Looking at the timeline as a whole, what's striking is the pace of it: quiet dinner, hand-holding, matching outfits, red carpet debut, public birthday post, each step feeling like a natural next one rather than a planned rollout. For someone who's kept her personal life fairly guarded since the Cruise divorce, choosing to be this visible about a relationship says something about how comfortable she is with him. Whether they keep showing up together at high-profile events or eventually settle into something quieter is anyone's guess. For now, they both seem fine with people watching.