Claire Gilliam was born England and has lived in the United States since 1999, becoming an American Citizen in 2017. In 1997, she graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK with a BA(hons) in Fine Art and completed the Professional Certificate in Photography at Rockport College, Maine in 2000. She has studied with photographers Arno Minkkinen and John Goodman, as well as master gelatin silver printer, Chuck Kelton and master printmaker, Vijay Kumar. In 2022, she worked closely with fine art photographer and author Barbara Mensch on her permanent installation “The Nobility of Work” at the newly renovated Tin Building in Lower Manhattan. The project opened to the public in 2023.

Her work has been shown in Europe and the USA and is held in private and public collections, including The ICP Library Print Collection and the Goethe Institute. In 2014 and 2015, several of her works were included in a touring exhibition entitled Embody: The Gender Issue throughout several cities across India and Sri Lanka. In 2021, she was chosen to be the inaugural artist with her exhibition ALPHABET at 1053 Gallery in Fleischmanns, NY. In 2022, her solo exhibition Sensitive Material was presented by Galerie l’Atelier in Chelsea, NYC. The Hearst Foundation selected her drawing A Memory Of What Was Said for Art Now 2023, an exhibition at the Hearst Tower that seeks to represent the “preoccupations of today’s visionaries”. She is represented by Nicolas Auvray Gallery in NY.