Kathryn O'Grady was born in 1956 in Birmingham Alabama. She received a BFA from Michigan State University, East Lansing, in 1978, and her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1982. She moved to southern Maryland in 1997, where she paints and maintains a huge garden, a family, cats, chickens and ducks. Her work has been shown in solo shows over the past thirty years in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Bloomington, Illinois, Bethesda, and Baltimore. Her group exhibitions in Texas have included Zoomorphism at the Dallas Zoo (1988), Prize Catch at Women and Their Work in Austin (1990), Texas Landscapes at the Art Center in Waco (2000), Texas Landscapes at the Grace Museum in Abilene (2000), Earth, Wind, Water, Sky at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts (2001) and Gallery in the Garden at the Governor's Mansion in Austin (2001, 2002). More recently in Maryland, she has been shown at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, The Baltimore Choral Arts Society Benefits, The Ladew Garden Benefit Exhibition atLadew Topiary Gardens, Monkton, Maryland, (2008) the Intercontinental Harbor Court Hotel in Baltimore, (2008, 2009), Celebrating Fifty Years (2009) and Contemporary Landscapes: Work From The Permanent Collection (summer, 2010) at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland, and the biennial Image and Imagination shows at St. Johns College in Annapolis (2008, 2010), where she won Best Two Dimensional Work in 2008. Kathryn has been shown at Steven Scott Gallery since 2004, including In Full Bloom (2004), Artist /Gardener (2005), Seven Remarkable Regional Realist Women (2006), Into the Forest (2007), As Far as the Eye Can See (2009), and a solo show in 2008. Her work is in the Texas collections of American Airlines, Mobile Oil Corporation, USAA, MBank, the Dallas-Fort Worth Medical Center, Seton Hospital and Saint David's Hospital in Austin, the Shannon Medical Center in San Angelo, and the Renaissance Womens Center in Austin. In Maryland, she is in the collections of the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Sheppard Pratt Hospital, Towson, Miles and Stockbridge, in Baltimore, and the University of Maryland, University College, in Adelphi.

My work is fueled by a lifelong obsession with color and awe at the monstrous complexity of the natural world. For the last several years I have lived and painted in rural Maryland. I am in love with the weather, the crops, the light, the dirt, the weeds. I am especially interested in the places where people's plans for the landscape collide with the riot of life that is there to begin with. Plants have an agenda of their own. I like the silliness, the frailty, the vanity of the human marks. I like the tornado of forces at work in nature. There is so much more going on than we can say.