Margaret Cary Colarelli was born in Illinois, but grew up in Brooklyn, New York and moved to Michigan about 30 years ago. The culture of the city where she roamed the museums of New York, and the beauty of the rural Michigan landscape have combined in her artistic sensibility. She has been active in art since childhood, and was introduced to figurative drawing and painting mainly in charcoal and oil through scholarship classes at Pratt Institute, and at the Brooklyn Museum Art School where she was taught for two years by Francis Cunningham in a lineage leading back to William Merritt Chase.