A Los Angeles native, Hilary Baker grew up among Hollywood’s film and music industry  professionals. She spent her childhood roaming the hills around her home in the canyons, hunting for animal bones and avoiding the occasional snake.  Her subjects, ranging from baseball and wildlife to California’s history and landscape, are depicted in her signature graphic style.  Known for her dissonant palette, her paintings hint at anxiety and mordant wit with unblinking clarity. Baker’s world is quarried from the strange, poetic, and darkly humorous with the confidence of a painter who is in the game for the long run.

Baker received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her Master of Fine Arts from the Otis Art Institute. She has exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally, including The Skulptur Projekt Münster, Germany and the Institut Franco-Americain, France, and has been awarded residencies at the Pont-Aven School of Art in France, the Ucross Foundation, Wyoming, Art Omi and Yaddo, New York, and the MacDowell colony, New Hampshire. Her paintings have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, L.A.Weekly, Art and Cake, Artillery and New American Paintings. Her work is included in numerous public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the Crocker Museum, Broad Art Foundation, Temple University, and the University of Southern California.

As a curator, she co-organized the exhibitions, Sexy: Sensual Abstraction in California, 1950’s -1990’s and Blind Courier: 9 Artists and Their Notions of Place.

She lives and works in Ojai, California, in the shadow of the Topatopa mountains.