Suzy Spence is a contemporary American painter based in New York City and Vermont. Her portraits and hunt scenes were first exhibited at The Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles in 1997, when dealer Colin DeLand of American Fine Arts, Co. decorated one of the hotel’s bedrooms with her work in an early iteration of an international art fair.

Spence grew up on the coast of Maine and studied at Smith College, Parsons School of Design (in both New York and Paris), and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (’96). She interned at the New Museum under Marcia Tucker before earning her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1998, with Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt as her thesis advisor. That same year, she had her first solo show at American Fine Arts, where she was the only painter represented by the gallery at the time.

Her work is in private and public collections, including the archives of Colin De Land’s American Fine Arts Co., held at The Smithsonian Archives of American Art and Bard College Library'; the collection of The New York Foundation for the Arts; M HKA Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Belgium; the Grazer Kunstverein, Graz Austria; Glarner Kunstverein, Glarus, Switzerland; The Zillman Museum at The University of Maine and the New England Museum of Contemporary Art (NNEMoCA) in addition to numerous private collections.

Reviews of Suzy Spence’s exhibitions have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Paper Magazine, Frieze, Artnet, Artcritical, 1st Dibs, Glorious Sport, Two Coats of Paint, The Brooklyn Rail, The Portland Press Herald, Art New England, Seven Days, and other publications. In winter of 2025 she was interviewed by Carrie Scott the British curator, art historian and influencer.