Margaret Garrett was born in North Carolina and raised in Pennsylvania. Margaret grew up training to be a dancer, leaving home at sixteen to join the Pennsylvania Ballet and later dancing as a soloist with the Cleveland Ballet. She subsequently turned to painting, and her richly colored abstract works capture the elusive qualities of rhythm and movement she first experienced as a performer. Her woodblock prints, including the Ghost Dance and Duo suites, bring the same kinetic energy to the medium.  

Margaret’s artistic practice includes painting, collage, printmaking, and video art. Dance and music inform her work. Richly colored abstract paintings and works on paper capture the elusive qualities of movement and rhythm. In 2017, Garrett returned to dancing to inspire new works: she began filming herself dancing and using the video clips as material to create moving video collages. These videos have become a major part of her practice and explore many of the same compositional elements as in her paintings- linear movement, shape, and the unfolding of contrapuntal patterns.

Margaret Garrett's work is held in numerous private and corporate collections in the United States and Europe. Museum collections include the Blanton Art Museum, the Parrish Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Collection, the Leiber Collection, and the Guild Hall Museum.