Claire Connolly is a figurative and social practice artist living and working in Buffalo, New York. She collaborates with her city-mates to create bodies of visual work in various media, and to express her relationship with anti-patriarchal experiences. After childbearing precipitated a personal crisis she established her artistic practice—having become inspired to invoke a world that exalts the beautiful mysteries surrounding stagnation, defeat and everyday chaos.

She sees her affinity for creating realistic oil paintings, an act which makes her feel alive, as a useful tool in her quest to excavate, investigate and give form to the ideas she co-discovers with her neighbors. Her work in oil, as well as ink, t-shirt printing and more, invite her audiences and portraitees to ‘speak art’ with her, towards the general reclamation of our full (murkier, richer) humanity.

In March 2025, she was honored as a "Woman Cementing History" by She Connects Hub in partnership with the Buffalo History Museum. She was awarded the Creative Impact Fund (2025) for Direct Message, a series of oil paintings, a run of workshops, and a chapbook—a project that engages her community around poetry. She was selected to participate in Hertel Alley Mural Fest (2025), at which she created Queen City, a self/Buffalo portrait. She received The Creative Impact Fund (2024), and the Mellon Foundation’s Communities of Care Artist Grant through the University at Buffalo (2024) for See Me Bearing, a reimagining of visual culture which centers The Childbearer archetype.