Mary GrandPré was born February 13, 1954 in South Dakota. She began drawing when she was five years old, beginning with a reproduction of Walt Disney's cartoon character "Mickey Mouse". By age ten, she was imitating Salvador Dalí, experimenting with stretched objects painted with oils, before graduating to copying black-and-white photos from the encyclopedia. She was influenced by the stained glass windows of the church where she attended Mass daily, saying, "There was a kind of luminous quality about them, a glow, that sometimes comes out in my artwork, whether I mean it to or not."
She was a Fine Arts major at Pomona College and was in her mid-twenties before she considered art school, having supposed illustration to be "a boring, commercial thing". She graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1981.
GrandPré married designer Kevin Whaley when she was young. After they divorced, she attended the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. After her graduation, GrandPré spent several years as a waitress while working to be noticed by ad agencies and attempting to find her own style. Her drawing evolved into what she calls "soft geometry", featuring pastels. Her work is created completely by hand, without using a computer.

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