All About Emily Ratajkowski’s Parents, Kathleen Balgley and John Ratajkowski

Emily Ratajkowski’s parents encouraged her creative pursuits

Emily Ratajkowski is most famous for her modeling career, but her reputation for being an art lover (and maker) comes from her parents, who have been professional artists her entire life.

The model, author, entrepreneur, podcast host and actress was born in London on June 7, 1991, to American parents Kathleen Balgley and John Ratajkowski. The pair raised Emily in Encinitas, a California beach city in San Diego.

Emily’s parents welcomed her — an only child — into their adult world of art and language from a young age. “We had a very atypical family structure. You both had your lives, and I kind of came into that. I like that neither of you ever stopped,” she recalled in a conversation with her father for Cultured.

Emily expressed her affection for her parents in a 2012 Instagram post, captioning the family photo, “Loves of my life.” Now, Emily is experiencing that love even more as her parents take on the role of grandparents to her son, Sylvester “Sly” Apollo, who she shares with ex-husband Sebastian Bear-McClard.

From her mother’s lessons regarding beauty to her father influencing an Oscar winner’s career, here’s everything to know about Emily Ratajkowski’s parents, Kathleen Balgley and John Ratajkowski.

Her mother is a writer and English professor

According to Kathleen’s personal website, she is a writer and English professor who holds a Ph.D in literature from the University of California, San Diego. In 2022, she wrote a memoir titled Letters to My Father: Excavating a Jewish Identity in Poland and Belarus.

Throughout her academic career, the writer and professor has been a lecturer at UCLA Writing Programs, an associate director of writing at UCSD’s Sixth College and a tenured associate professor of English at California State University, San Luis Obispo.

Like her daughter, Kathleen was an avid reader from an early age. Combined with writing and a childhood spent frequently moving around the United States, her love of reading helped her to develop a habit of “noticing and remembering,” she explained on her website.

Among many career accomplishments, Kathleen names the experience of mothering Emily as “the most life-changing, and in the best of ways.” One of her upcoming books is set to be a collaboration with her husband’s drawings of the people and places of Bantry, County Cork, Ireland, where the couple have owned a home since 1984.

Her father is an artist and former high school art teacher

John is an accomplished visual artist and former high school art teacher. For 40 years, John taught art in San Diego, having even instructed his daughter at San Dieguito Academy, where his students called him “Rata.”

According to his personal website, the artist was raised in Coronado across the bay from San Diego. Intrigued by a variety of art materials throughout his childhood, John recalls working across drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking and lithography from a young age. He cites painting as his “true love.”

The multidisciplinary artist received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which he used to render large black-and-white portraits of Alzheimer’s patients. His abstract work took him to Ireland for a two-year sabbatical to pursue non-figurative landscapes. This project resulted in two major exhibitions in Dublin.

Over the past three decades, John has restored two old homes, one in Sant Joan, Mallorca, and the other in Bantry.

They spent Emily’s childhood summers in Saint Joan, Mallorca

In a 2022 post on Instagram, Emily wrote: “Today I brought my beautiful baby back to Sant Juan [sic], the town where I spent every summer of my childhood.”

Emily recalls having spent each summer until the age of 14 in Mallorca, where her parents restored a home.

Emily’s parents impacted her views on beauty

In her 2021 New York Times best-selling collection of essays, My Body, Emily wrote about praying to be beautiful. Regarding her parents, she wrote that “it seemed important to them both, especially to my mother, that their daughter be perceived as beautiful.”

In an interview on The Drew Barrymore Show, Emily spoke about her mother’s relationship to beauty and the subliminal messages she passed onto her daughter, implying that beauty was where women derived their power — a sentiment Emily challenges in her book.

“I think that my mom learned that being beautiful could secure her safety in her relationships and day-to-day interactions. Understanding where she fell in this ranking system was vital to her survival in some ways,” the model told Elle. “There’s no winning or losing. But it’s something that I think all young women have to unlearn, or maybe just women in general.”

John raised Emily around art

Ahead of an interview between Emily and her father for Cultured, the magazine reported that Emily grew up spending hours on the floor of her father’s studio while he worked on paintings and sculptures, as her mother was focused on her career elsewhere.

Now immersed in the worlds of fashion, literature and entertainment in New York City, the entrepreneur has become an artist herself, making collages. She developed this skill from being a student in her father’s art class, according to Cultured.

In her adult life, Emily has developed a love for visual art, too, producing and selling an NFT with Christie’s.

Emily’s mother has had cancer

As reported by The Southern Star in 2022, Kathleen was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2018. At the time, she was advised that there was no cure for this cancer, which affects white blood cells made in bone marrow. However, Kathleen is now in remission, according to The Star.

In an Instagram post at the end of 2019, Emily spoke publicly about her mother’s diagnosis. “2019 was one of the hardest years of my life. My mom was really sick, I was battling a serious depression and everything felt very uncertain,” she wrote in the photo’s caption.

John and Kathleen are grandparents to Emily’s son

On March 8, 2021, Emily gave birth to her son, Sylvester Apollo, who she often refers to as “Sly.”

John has posted several photos with his grandson on social media, including one of Sylvester in his art studio.

Oscar-winning Producer Jonathan Wang said John Ratajkowski was “the reason he became an artist”

In 2023, Everything Everywhere All at Once took home seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. One of the people who went home with a trophy that night was film producer Jonathan Wang.

In conversation with her father for Cultured, Emily recalled chatting with Wang at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party that year: “I was just at the Academy Awards, and I saw one of your former students, Jonathan Wang, right after he got his Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once.” She continued, ”He told me you were the reason he became an artist.”

To that, Emily’s father replied: “The first day I met that kid, I thought, he’s gonna be just fine. If you take somebody who knows who they are and put them out in the world, they’ll do great things.”

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