Jon Åsmund Pettersen (born 1948)

Translator's Note: This is a machine-assisted translation completed on June 2, 2025. While care has been taken to maintain accuracy, this translation has not yet undergone human review or validation.

Pettersen grew up in Fredrikstad but has spent much of his adult life living in Bergen. He returned to his hometown in the autumn of 2018, following his retirement.

Pettersen is a trained teacher and has worked for many years in the field of arts and crafts education. He concluded his career in the spring of 2018 as an Associate Professor at the Department of Art, University of Bergen.

In the interview, Pettersen recounts how, as a young man, he married a woman and had two children with her. They divorced in 1994, and it was only then that he began to seek out queer communities and started to embrace that part of his identity.

An excerpt from the interview is presented below, in which Pettersen describes the process he went through in order to live openly as a gay man.

The full interview is available in our reading room. We met Jon Åsmund Pettersen in Bergen, October 2018.