Lily Prince received her BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1984 and her MFA in painting in 1991 from Bard College's the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. In 1991, Prince studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Also in 1991, Lily participated in The Bronx Museum's Art-in-the-Marketplace Program. In 1983-1984, she studied abroad on Rhode Island School of Design's European Honors Program in Rome.
Lily Prince's paintings and works on paper synthesize a gestural, observational mark-making technique within an organic abstraction mode. She has exhibited in over 50 juried and invitational shows nationally and internationally and her works have been commissioned by numerous hotels for their presidential suites and public spaces and most recently, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs for the new medical examiner's office building. Prince has had solo shows at both the Johnson + Johnson World Headquarters Gallery in New Brunswick, NJ and Domo Gallery in Summit, NJ, both in 2005. Prince has been reviewed in the New York Times six times and in the Newark Star-Ledger. A catalogue of her drawings “The Ten Plagues” was published, with poems by David Shapiro, by The Paterson Museum. Prince's paintings have appeared in New American Paintings, the New York Times and the San Francisco Weekly.
Lily Prince has exhibited in Germany, Israel, England, Poland, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Prince has lectured on her work to the Rhode Island School of Design's European Honors Program in Rome; Pratt Institute's graduate painting class; and at Fulcrum Gallery in New York for the Artists Talk on Art series (televised on Manhattan cable TV).
Critic, poet and art historian David Shapiro has written about Prince's work in his essay for the catalogue “Paper Point Blank”:
She seems to have a learned scattering, the carefulness that
counts, and the multiple humors of the body. It is easy to discern a
Tantric centering that might also be part of the heritage of her
essential syncretism. These richly colored works speak of a bold
mysticity. But the balance and Eros of the work is strange and
strongly painterly, and strong too its reliance on a devastating
doubleness of vision. In Prince, one is observing both the pleasures
of observation and a severe and principled devotion to abstraction.
Lily Prince