An artist I was working with last year sent me a single document titled "About Me" and asked me to clean it up for a gallery submission. It was three paragraphs long. The first was a list of exhibitions and degrees. The second was a meditation on how light moves through water. The third was a quote from Bachelard.
It was a bio and a statement mashed into one, and it worked as neither. The gallery would have skimmed it and moved on. This happens all the time, and it is almost always fixable once you understand that these are two completely different texts with different jobs.
What an Artist Bio Does
A bio answers one question: who is this person? It is written in third person. It reads like a profile, not a confession. It covers facts: where the artist was born and is based, where they studied, notable exhibitions, collections, residencies, awards, and publications. The tone is neutral and professional.
A good bio is between 100 and 200 words. Longer versions exist for catalogs and grants, but the core bio should be tight. Galleries want to scan it in 30 seconds and understand the artist's professional standing.
Here is what a working bio looks like in practice: "Maria Torres (b. 1987, Bogotá) is a painter and printmaker based in Berlin. She holds an MFA from the Universität der Künste and has exhibited at Galerie Nord, ARCO Madrid, and the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art. Her work is held in private collections across Europe and Latin America. She was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2024."
Four sentences. No adjectives. No philosophy. Just the facts that tell a curator or collector: this person is serious, active, and recognized.
What an Artist Statement Does
A statement answers a different question: what is this work about? It is written in first person. It reads like the artist thinking out loud, explaining what drives their practice, what questions they are asking through their work, and what the viewer should know to engage with it more deeply.
This is where most artists struggle. Not because they don't know what their work is about, but because writing about it requires a different skill than making it. The result is often one of two extremes: either painfully vague ("my work explores the relationship between memory and space") or painfully academic ("through a post-colonial lens, I interrogate the semiotics of displacement").
Neither works. A good statement is specific and human. It tells the reader something they cannot see by looking at the art alone. Why does this artist paint the same subject repeatedly? What changed in their process after they moved cities? Why do they use this particular material and not another?
Length varies by context. For a gallery submission, 150-300 words. For a grant application, sometimes up to 500. But shorter is almost always stronger.
The Quick Test
If someone reads your text and knows where you studied and what prizes you've won but has no idea what your art looks like, you wrote a bio.
If someone reads your text and can picture the work in their head but has no idea whether you've shown anywhere, you wrote a statement.
You need both.
Where Each One Goes
Bio goes: gallery website artist page, exhibition catalog artist section, grant applications (CV section), press releases, art fair materials, your own website's About page.
Statement goes: exhibition proposals, grant applications (project description), gallery catalog essays (sometimes quoted or paraphrased), your own website alongside your portfolio, open call submissions.
Both go: most gallery submissions (they will ask for each separately), residency applications, fellowship applications.
Common Mistakes
Mixing them. The number one problem. If your bio contains sentences about your artistic philosophy, or your statement lists your exhibitions, the reader gets confused about what they are reading and why. Keep them separate. Always.
Writing the bio in first person. "I was born in Bogotá and studied in Berlin." No. Third person. It reads as if someone else wrote it about you, which gives it authority. First person bios sound like dating profiles.
Making the statement about yourself instead of the work. "I have always been fascinated by light" is about you. "The paintings use layered washes of translucent oil to trap light between surfaces, creating depth that shifts as the viewer moves" is about the work. The statement should be about the work.
Using jargon as a substitute for thinking. If you remove the theoretical language from your statement and nothing meaningful remains, the statement needs to be rewritten. Theory should support the ideas, not replace them.
Not updating. Your bio from 2019 is missing four years of exhibitions. Your statement from art school may describe a practice you've moved on from. Both should be updated at least once a year, or whenever your work changes direction significantly.
When to Get Help
Writing your own bio is straightforward once you know the format. Writing your own statement is harder because it requires distance from your own work, and distance is exactly what you don't have.
A professional art writer can interview you for 30 minutes and produce a statement that sounds like you but reads better than anything you'd write alone. It is one of the most cost-effective investments an artist can make. A strong statement doesn't just help with one submission. It works for years.
If you need help with either, let's talk. I've written bios and statements for artists at every stage of their careers.