She was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to an American mother and Ethiopian father. During the "Red Terror” of the Derg, a junta (a military council that controls the government after a coup), her family fled to the United States. After spending the remainder of her childhood and adolescence in East Lansing, Michigan, she began her studies at Kalamazoo College, and completed a year abroad at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal. As an MFA student at the Rhode Island School of Design, she played with cartographic qualities within her drawings, offering glimpses of demographic analysis that refused easy reading or conclusion. In 2000, she began a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where her work expanded in scale, architectural focus, and methods of mapmaking.

Mehretu’s process is meticulous and lengthy. She begins with a structural outline and then adds, subtracts, manipulates, and erases images through repeated layering separated by coats of clear acrylic. Her large-scale canvases map the psychogeography of space and play with the parameters and limitations of abstraction, figuration, and landscape. Her recent works source materials not only from architectural drawings and maps, but also from historical and contemporary photography, magazines, and newspaper clippings. As Mehretu notes, the spaces opened by the abstract nature of the works are “not something that you can actually put direct language to, but you can have these visceral experiences with it. That allows there to be a different form of possibility in it—in its refusal of exact language.”

Mehretu received her BA from Kalamazoo College and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She received awards such as a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2003); MacArthur Fellowship (2005); and the US Department of State Medal of Arts Award (2015). The Studio Museum presented her work in the exhibitions including Freestyle (2001); The Bearden Project (2011); and Their Own Harlems (2017).