Born December 16^th 1965 in Providence Rhode Island.She is referred to as African American.She is of biracial ethinicity:her fathers ethinicity is from Cape Verde in western Africa (but he was born in the United States) and her mothers background was Caucasian Irish Catholic. Gallagher is an American abstract Artist who became reckonised in 1995.Her work has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions and her work is part of the permanent collections of many major museums.

The media she uses is paint,work on paper,film and video.Some of her pieces refer to issues of race,and many combine formality with racial stereotypes and depict ‘ordering principles’ society imposes.

In those themes relating to race she sometimes uses pictographs,symbols,codes and repitisions. ‘Sambo lips’ and ‘bug eyes’ refer to Black Minstrel shows and are often seen through out her work.

Her infuences include the paintings of Agnes Martin and the repetitive writings of Gertude Stein.Some of Gallagers works involve repitively modernising advertising found in African American focused publications such as Ebony,sepia and our world’.Her most famous pieces are of magazines grouped together in larger pieces.Each of these works contain more then 60 prints employing techniques of photogravure,spit bite,collage,cutting,scratching,silkscreen,offset lithography and hand building.She is also known to glue notebook paper drawings to her canvases in order to create texture.

Some of her early influences  while attending the school of the museum of fine Arts in Boston were the Darkroom collective,a group of poets living and working out of Innman square Cambridge.