BIOGRAPHY Born in Pennsylvania and raised partially in upstate New York and the Midwest, visual artist Leslie Ayers attended Columbus College of Art & Design for two years to study art foundations rooted in the paradigm of Bauhaus. In 1998, she graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in Painting and Drawing where she studied both figurative and non-objective oil painting with Amy Sillman (NYC) and Don Southard (SAIC). After apprenticing with artist Steve Powers (Philadelphia) with ArtWorks, she relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2001, where she spent a decade crafting large format non-objective oils on canvas while studying printmaking and dance. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums nationally, most notably Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago and the Center for Contemporary Art, William Shearburn Gallery and Yares Art Projects in Santa Fe. She is a recipient of a partial fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, Phyllis Muth Scholarship for Fine Arts, Harry Nadler Memorial Fellowship Award, a Dedalus Foundation Fellowship Nomination and the Marion & Kathryn Crissey Emerging Artist Award from Harwood Art Center in 2008. She recently graduated with distinction from the University of New Mexico School of Art and Art History, earning her MFA in Studio Arts in 2012, when her second solo show and thesis exhibition Your Gold was mounted at SCA Contemporary in Albuquerque. Her work has been included in group exhibitions, most notably Reasons, Excuses, Alibis and NonSequiturs, juried by LA Times art critic David Pagel at the University of New Mexico Art Museum and two-part exhibition Heaven /Hell by independent curator David Solomon in Santa Fe. A selection of her work from her thesis was recently filmed and shown in "Madrigal," season five, episode two of AMC’s television series Breaking Bad. Paintings, drawings and prints are included in public collections such as EPA and St. John's College, as well as in private collections in Santa Fe, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Boston and Albuquerque.