Leeanne Crisp (b. 1950) was born in Adelaide, where she attended the South Australian School of Art and gained an advanced diploma from the Western Teacher's College in 1972. She held her first solo exhibition in 1977 at Canberra's Solander Gallery. Since then she has participated in some 50 group and five solo shows, and taught casually and on contract at ANU, where she completed her master's degree in visual arts (painting) in 2000 with a series of works drawing on her Protestant childhood in Adelaide. She has held residencies at Cape Town University (1998) and Megalo Arts Access (2004).
Crisp won the ANU Institute of the Arts Drawing Prize in 1998; was hung in the Blake Prize of 2000; and curated and exhibited works for The Secret Life of Plants at the Australian Academy of Science during the fourth International Legume Conference of 2002. Described by painter Tim Johnson as a 'psychological realist', she was shortlisted for the Portia Geach Prize in 2003 and runner up and people's choice for the Canberra Art Prize in 2004. The National Library owns her illustrated books of poems by Judith Wright.
