Mari Elsa Giddings was born in 1959 in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Maryland, New York, and Arizona. She studied art at Phoenix College with Meryl Mahaffey and Allen Dutton, then took her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Arizona State University in 1984, where she worked under master printers Dan Britten and Wayne Kimball. In 1986 she became chief assistant to master printer Robert A. Devoe at Phoenix Art Press. Shortly after, Mari opened her own studio in the Verde Valley in northern Arizona where she happily painted landscapes for several years. In 1991 Mari moved back to Phoenix to become the Art Director of Phoenix Art Press. In 1995 Mari co-founded Planet Art Group.

Mari works in a variety of styles, from naturalistic landscapes to cubist abstraction, yet she sees no contradiction in these approaches. "Neither strict representation nor abstraction", she says, "are simply imitations of reality, but tools for the construction and reflection of an artist’s individual experience. As infants we learn to objectify our individual perceptions through relating with others. In the same way, art allows us to conceptualize subjective experience by turning it into an object that can be shared. In this sense, all art, abstract and representational, is simultaneously self-portraiture and a mob scene, intimate and public."

"My art helps me to see beyond culturally learned forms, breaking down perceptions that are so deeply ingrained, so taken for granted that they seem real, the only possible way to see. For me, successful art destroys the obvious connections by which we construct our realities and makes new connections, then it destroys those connections, too, realizing infinite alternatives. Art is never a finished product, but a moving, living, immediate process which begins again with every painting ... and with every viewing."