Amanda Barrow was raised in the Mid-west by a social worker and an Episcopalian priest, in an environment conducive to creativity and abstract thinking. In 1992, a Fulbright research grant provided an opportunity for her to live and work in India for 13 months. She has returned to India many times since then, funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Boston Cultural Council, and a host of other institutions. At present, she lives/works in Massachusetts, New York and Maine. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Boston and New York Public Libraries, and the Museum of the Book in the Netherlands, among numerous other places around the world.

Recent travels in Asia, Europe, and New Zealand have enhanced her personal vision, leading her to dig deeper into the indigenous spiritual ambiance of the East in her artwork. Synthesizing these Eastern concepts with the Western visual language of her upbringing is her intention. She experiments with transparency and explores the inherent structure of her chosen medium. The resulting work presents a broad range of abstractions that utilize nature, architecture and the human body as her primary sources of inspiration.