Holly Branstner has been working as an artist for forty years, though it seems even longer given how inseparable being and making are to her existence. Born in Gaylord, Michigan to a Methodist minister father and an elementary school teacher mother, Branstner was raised in Detroit where she graduated from Wayne State University with her MFA in 1983. She continued to reside and work in Detroit as an artist in what were, in retrospect, the incredibly stimulating and yet profoundly disturbing years of that city’s waning glory. Her work, often regardless of its subject, is always a reflection of her youth and subsequent summers spent at an idyllic Lake Louise in northern Michigan and her intimate, wrestling, and nostalgic relationship with the attracting complexities of Detroit, its surrounds, and Toledo, Ohio where she now lives. Currently she is focusing on a series of moody and abstracted depictions and less-obvious visions that begin with what remains of the industrial landscapes of Detroit’s River Rouge and the periphery of Toledo. What these paintings become when done is as much about a life in painting as they are about the other dimensions of Branstner’s personal history in and among the places that both stimulate and haunt her life and art. Holly’s work is in the permanent collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the University of Dayton, the University of Evansville, and Crown Equipment Corporation as well as in the personal possession of many private individuals. She has received numerous awards for her work, including three individual artist grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts and a Canaday Award from the Toledo Museum of Art. Recently she has served as an artist-in-residence at the University of Dayton where her work continues to be regularly shown in the context of exhibitions of American art from the Dicke Collection. Holly may be contacted at hbranstnerstudio@gmail.com.