Before turning her eye toward the art world in 1980, O’Grady had an incredibly varied career: she studied economics at Wellesley College and fiction at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, and worked as a United States government intelligence analyst and translator. After moving to New York in the 1970s, and growing dissatisfied with her work as a music critic, she accepted an offer to teach literature at the School of the Visual Arts. In the late 1970s, she produced her first artwork, inspired by the Futurist, Dadaist, and Surrealist artists she taught in the classroom.

O’Grady went on to become an active, innovative voice in New York art spaces that served as incubators for artists who were rarely represented in major museum and gallery exhibitions. While volunteering at Just Above Midtown, an art gallery and laboratory that foregrounded artists of color, she produced work that reflected on race and identity. She also joined the Women’s Action Coalition, where she advocated for a more diverse, inclusive approach to feminism that incorporated the concerns of women of color. Throughout her career, she has pioneered a distinctive approach to work, one that is activist by nature and explores the diptych as a conceptual framework, tool for institutional critique, and alternative to the binaries of Western thinking.

O’Grady earned her BA from Wellesley College. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2008); United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship (2011): and Creative Capital Award in Visual Art (2015). Beyond her artistic practice, she has written numerous essays investigating the relationship between text and image, race and representation in contemporary art, and conceptual photography. The Studio Museum has presented her work in exhibitions such as Shift: Projects | Perspectives | Directions (2012) and Lorraine O’Grady: Art Is... (2015).