Leah Oates was born and raised in Massachusetts and in Maine and has lived on Chicago, IL and in Brooklyn, NY and now resides in Toronto, Canada with her husband, son and cat.

Oates has been a practicing artist for many years and studied painting, printmaking and photography during her BFA at Rhode Island School of Design and during her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Oates was a Fulbright Fellow for Printmaking at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland and also studied at Mass Art in Boston.

Oates has traveled extensively on residencies and/or arts awards/prizes to Rome, Italy, Taipei, Taiwan St. Johns, Newfoundland and to Chicago, Illinois. She has also spent time photographing in Beijing, China and Turku, Finland.

Oates was raised in a creative family and was attending art openings and arts events from a very young age and she studied ballet from age five to age twelve. Her husband is a video artist, painter and designer, her mother, brother and grandfather are painters, her father was a writer, her grandfather was a photography enthusiast and painter, her uncle is a potter, her aunt is a glass artist and her cousin is an actor and signer.

Oates is represented in New York City by Susan Eley Fine Art and she recently was commissioned to do a lightbox installation at 42nd Street with the Manhattan Transit Authority which was sponsored by the MTA, Kodak Alaris and Duggal NYC with help from My Own Color Lab, NYC.

Oates has had twenty solo shows at venues the NYC area at venues including Susan Eley Fine Art, The Central Park Arsenal Gallery, The Center for Book Arts , AIR Gallery and The Brooklyn Public Library and nationally at Real Art Ways in Connecticut, Artemisia Gallery and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago and recently at Black Cat Artspace in Toronto.

Oates has had been part of numerous group exhibitions in the NYC area at The Pen and Brush Gallery, Rush Art Gallery, WAH Center, Islip Art Museum, Denise Bibro Gallery, Momenta Gallery, Nurture Art Gallery, Wave Hill, Yale University, Edward Hopper House and nationally and internationally at Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in Florida, City Without Walls in New Jersey, Wexford Art Centre in Ireland and the Royal Scottish Academy in Scotland.

Oates has work in numerous private and public collections including the Art in Embassies Program in Muscat, Oman, The American Embassy in Beijing, China, the Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona, The Josie Robertson Surgery Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering, NYC, The Brooklyn Museum of Art in NYC, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.