Rosalee McGilvery is a multidisciplinary, award-winning painter, portrait & boudoir photographer, and self-portrait artist whose work explores women, the body, nature, and the many ways we understand beauty. She creates from her studio at Western Avenue Studios, one of the largest artist collectives in the United States.

 

Through both painting and photography, she highlights the female form with a particular interest in vulnerability, self-love, and the reclamation of the body. Her figurative paintings frequently relate the body directly to nature, exploring the body as an ecosystem and celebrating the imperfect, asymmetrical, and ever-changing qualities that make each body unique. Her work challenges narrow ideals of beauty and asks viewers to regard women with the same curiosity, awe, and acceptance we instinctively extend to nature. 

 

She has a particular focus of representing bodies that have often been overlooked or excluded from traditional representations of beauty, including disabled bodies and bodies shaped by chronic illness. Diagnosed with severe Crohn's Disease as a child, she grew up navigating an unpredictable and constantly changing body. Her work is deeply influenced by her lived experience and the ongoing process of learning how to not only exist in a body that doesn't always cooperate, but to love it as well. Creating offered a means to heal, broadening her views on beauty, and helping to reclaim her body on her own terms and hopefully encourage others to do the same. 

 

She is the owner of Rosalee McGilvery Studios and Feminine Fables Boudoir, through which she celebrates the form through both fine art portraiture and painting. Across mediums, her work is grounded in the belief that women deserve to be seen, accepted and admired, not as objects to be perfected or consumed, but as powerful, complex, uniquely imperfect, and inherently worthy beings.