Shelagh Keeley was born in 1954 in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. She graduated in 1977 with an Honours BFA from York university, Toronto, Ontario. Over the last 35 years she has exhibited her work in Canada, the U.S., France, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, China and India. She is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Getty Museum (Santa Monica), Harvard Art Museum (Boston), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven), and the Yale University Art Gallery, as well as many private collections internationally. She lived in New York City and Paris, France for 22 years and now lives full-time in Toronto.

Her work deals with drawing, memory, wall drawings, site-specific installations, photography, film and collage elements. The work is concerned with the strength of vulnerability, fragility and slowness. It comes from a space of intuition and instinctive intelligence dealing with pleasure, sensuality, desire and eroticism.