Allison B. Miner graduated cum laude from the Randolph-Macon Woman's College and received a MFA from Queens College.

Through a combination of bold artistic decisions, Allison B. Miner creates paintings that test our notions of "personal space" and challenge our preconceptions of gender and beauty. She paints portraits of people who are close to her, either of her life partner or of friends and acquaintances in Washington, D.C.'s queer community. Ms. Miner describes her portraits as "intimate," but they can feel just a little bit too intimate. They bring us uncomfortably close to her subjects, often showing only a portion of a face that fills the frame. She presents these men and women from angles that make us feel not entirely appropriate. These are not the straight-on views of everyday social interaction. Rather, she gives us the angles that few people see - the angles of a personal closeness that exists only between lovers, or between parent and child or very close friends. What is disquieting is that these people are strangers to us. Out of politeness, we want to back away. But Miner's paintings are tiny, forcing us to come even closer. Even the way she applies her paint - with thick and luscious impasto, like icing on a cake - seems unsettling. It is not at all modest. She paints her images rough. There is no air-brushing or softening of the model's features here. The artist gives us her friends as she sees them, pretty or not, safe or not, right or wrong. She fractures - practically dissects - the face, giving each small portion an importance all its own. To study a face like this in real life would require us to gaze way too long and to hold ourselves way, way too close.

Allison B. Miner lives and paints in Washington DC. She received her BA in 1998 from Randolph-Macon Woman's College and her MFA in 2000 from Queens College, CUNY. In 2003, Ms. Miner received a Young Artists Program grant from the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities (with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts). She has exhibited her works in numerous group and solo exhibitions on the East Coast, including a September 2003 solo exhibition at the Nevin Kelly Gallery. She lives in the Dupont Circle/U Street Corridor section of Washington.