Lisa Milroy was born in Vancouver, Canada and lives and works in London and Lydd-on-Sea, Kent.
Still life is at the heart of Milroy’s practice. In the 1980s her paintings featured ordinary objects depicted against an off-white background. Subsequently her still life imagery expanded to include depictions of objects within settings as well as landscape, architecture, food, people, pattern and textiles. As her approach to still life diversified, so did her manner of painting, giving rise to a range of stylistic innovations. Throughout her practice, Milroy has been fascinated by the relation between stillness and movement, and the nature of making and looking at painting.
Milroy won First Prize in the John Moores Painting Prize 1989 and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2005. She is Professor Emerita of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL and Professor of Painting at the RA Schools. Milroy was Artist Trustee of Tate from 2013-17 and Liaison Trustee to the National Gallery from 2015-17. Her work is held in many public collections, including Tate, Frac Occitanie Montpellier, France, Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA, Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan and East African Visual Arts Trust, Kenya. Milroy is represented by Kate MacGarry, London and in East Africa by One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Nairobi.
In 2015 Milroy set up Hands On Art Workshops with support from Vodafone Foundation and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Artist and curator Stephanie Nebbia joined Hands On Art Workshops as Co-Director in 2020. Hands On Art Workshops is an art educational initiative that offers a programme of practical art workshops for primary and secondary school students in Kakuma Refugee Camp and Kalobeyei Settlement, Kenya delivered through video conference, mobile phone messaging, in person mission visits by Milroy and Nebbia in tandem with leadership and management by local artists in Kakuma and Kalobeyei. Hands On Art Workshops also features a range of other educational measures, including a scholarship in support of education for girls and the Hands On m2 Gallery designed to showcase artwork by Hands On students. Hands On Art Workshops works in partnership with UNHCR, Windle International Kenya, Colart, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, Book Aid International and Vodafone Foundation.