Cheryl Donegan received her B.F.A. in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. at Hunter College in New York. In her breakthrough videos of the 1990’s, Donegan combined time-based, gestural media of performance and video with forms such as painting, drawing, and installation. Direct, irreverent, and infused with an ironic eroticism, Donegan's works put a subversive spin on issues relating to sex, gender, art-making and art history. Using her body as metaphor in her earlier works, Donegan's performative actions before the camera often resulted in or related to process paintings and drawings. More recently, Donegan’s paintings derive abstraction from debased images of consumer objects and spaces. The roots of her performance practice can be traced to current forays in to fashion.  As critic Nick Stillman writes in Art Forum: " Donegan's recent work remains acidic, but it has turned abstract." Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently in her first career survey at Kunsthalle Zurich (summer 2017). In June 2018, Donegan opened another survey of her works from 2009 to present at the Aspen Museum of Art, traveling to Contemporary Art Museum in Houston in 2019. Other venues include a one person exhibitions at The New Museum, New York City (2016), the 1995 Whitney Biennial, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Tang Museum of Art, New York Film and Video Festival, 1993 Venice Biennale, and the1995  Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, France, in addition to many individual and group exhibitions in Europe and America. Donegan was a faculty member in the Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Art, New York from 1997-2013. She has been a seminar leader and guest critic at Yale University, was a faculty member at Skowhegan School of Drawing and Painting, Summer 2011 and a visiting artist/lecturer at numerous art programs in the United States. She lives in New York City and in Istria, Croatia.