Liz Rider was born in October 1977 in Cleveland, Ohio. She and her family moved to Atlanta, Georgia when she was five years old. Well before high school, she displayed intense talent in painting and was consistently regarded as the most artistically gifted student in her class.

At the young age of six, Rider also exhibited great talent for tennis. She proceeded to tour the country for almost a decade, avidly competing in tournaments throughout coastal California, Canada, and even Hawaii. These competitive travels not only instilled in her a focus and rigor which would later improve her artistic process, but also exposed her to the diverse, exotic palettes of American landscapes. She would sketch and paint these landscapes whenever she found time from her intense competitions.

Rider kept up her painting throughout her sports career and decided in her late teens that the forging of a piece of art from the blank canvas is what fulfilled her. With that, she chose to focus on developing her skills in color, form and design. She applied to the University of Georgia and was offered a full scholarship in painting and photography. She graduated with honors and awards three short years later.

Her most recent work has blended an abstract palette and arrangement with natural settings and forms, so as to bring out the simple brilliance of a natural scene, while also seeing within that landscape primitive abstract forms. The result is a kind of surrealist landscape wherein Rider asks us to compare fields of undulating grass with curved, abstract lines — where nature and abstract meet.

Rider currently works out of her studios in both Athens and Atlanta.