Holly Winters was born in 1964 (and raised) in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. She studied fine art at Mount Allison University, Sackville New Brunswick and received her degree in 1987. Her major was in painting. Following graduation, Holly moved to Toronto and lived there for three years exploring abstract intuitive art. She decided to move to Vancouver in 1991 where she worked as a picture framer and continued her art. In 1998, Holly returned to Nova Scotia where she stayed in Halifax, but returned to Vancouver in 2000. Since then she has continued on her abstract intuitive paintings, and also delved into embroidered fabric images of her intuitive drawings and paintings for a while. In 2007, she focused on butterfly imagery and in 2016 had a butterfly diptych that will be exhibited in Osaka and Kanazawa, Japan. From 2014 to 2015, Holly has worked primarily on abstracted paintings of bird plumage in the form of horizontal bands of colour. In 2017, Holly has revised images of Viking art motifs she designed for knitting patterns into paintings for the Nordic art show at the Scandinavian Centre as well as exhibiting her abstract intuitive paintings at the Vancouver Outsider Festival in the summer of 2017.