Carol Diehl is a painter who has used words, numbers and symbols to record the events of her life on canvas in dense painterly formats that marry the literal with the abstract. One-person exhibitions of her work include those at Gary Snyder Fine Art in 2002, and Hirschl & Adler Modern in 1996 and 1998. Diehl is the recipient of artists' fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the MacDowell Colony for the Arts and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her paintings have been shown in group exhibitions at, among others, the Queens Museum of Art, the Aldrich Museum, the Sidney Janis Gallery and the traveling exhibition entitled "New Directions" curated by Sam Hunter. Reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, ARTnews, the New York Times, New York, the Village Voice, Review, the New Art Examiner, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Daily News.
Diehl is also known as an art critic and poet, and is a Contributing Editor for Art in America. Her writing has also been published in ARTnews, New York, Art & Auction, Art & Antiques (contributing editor 1984-1995), Metropolis, Review, Arts, and the New Art Examiner (of which she was the founding managing editor). She has read her poetry in performance at, among others, St. Mark's Poetry Project, the Knitting Factory, and the Nuyorican Poets Café-as well as appearing with Butch Morris's "Chorus of Poets" at The Public Theater, the Whitney Museum and the Bang on a Can Festival at Lincoln Center. Her poetry is included in the anthology Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (Henry Holt and Company), winner of the 1994 National Book Award.
Diehl lives and works in New York City and southwestern Massachusetts. She has served on the faculty of the Graduate Fine Arts Program of the School of Visual Arts in New York (1996-2006) and Bennington College (1998-2002). In 2003 she was a Visiting Artist at the Vermont Studio Center and produced a series of prints with the Vermont Studio Center Press. In 2004 she was a Senior Critic in the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania as well as Visiting Artist at Columbia College in Chicago, and produced a series of prints with Anchor Graphics. In 2006 she taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, was a Visiting Artist at the University of Iowa, and the Forkosh-Hirschman lecturer at Arizona State University. Diehl will revisit the Vermont Studio Center as a Visiting Artist in January 2008.