Emily McIlroy uses the practice of drawing and painting, and her own particular practice of abstraction, as a means of connecting inner and outer "wildernesses." Her large-scale works on paper explore forces and life forms of the natural world as metaphors for human experiences of love, loss, grief, and wonder. 

Emily was born and raised in Norman, Oklahoma. She received her BA in Studio Art from the University of Arizona in 2005 and her MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2011. She served many years as an instructor and art educator for the Honolulu Museum of Art School and the Hawai‘i State Art Museum. She has taught in the Drawing and Painting Program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa since 2012. 

McIlroy’s work has been exhibited widely across the United States, including recent solo exhibitions at the Holter Museum of Art (Helena, MT); Dairy Arts Center (Boulder, CO); Emerson Center for the Arts and Culture (Bozeman, MT); Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts (Fond du Lac, WI); and the Honolulu Museum of Art (Honolulu, HI). She has previously been Artist-in-Residence at Chulitna Lodge Creative Residency Program (Port Alsworth, AK); Sitka Center for Art and Ecology (Otis, OR); Glacier National Park (West Glacier, MT); and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts (Saratoga, WY). She is a recipient of the Marianne Oberg Foundation for Spiritual Art Grant (2022). 

To learn more about Emily and her work, please visit: