Connie M. Borup was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on May 1, 1945. As a young girl, she lived with her family in Kaysville, Utah. Living in a rural area instilled a strong appreciation for the land in Connie.

She comments, “some of my first memories have to do with fields, gullies, ponds, and the flat stretch of earth leading to the Great Salt Lake.“ This imagery can be seen in her landscape work today. As a young woman, she often saw LaConte Stewart, a prominent local landscape artist. She once took an art class from Stewart and was greatly influenced by his work.

As a teenager, Connie was more interested in the violin and in German than she was in art. She spent a year in Koln, Germany, and earned a Bachelor of Arts in German from the University of Utah in 1967. During her college years, she married and took time out for her family. Borup has one daughter.

In 1973, Connie Borup returned to the University of Utah and completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and drawing. She began teaching German and art at Layton High School and remained there four years. The following nine years, she taught art and German at Brighton High School in Salt Lake City.

A pivotal point in Borup's art career came when she went to Vermont for a month to study under Wolf Kahn. This experience helped her push her work in the direction of a “... more personal interpretation of the landscape.“

Later, while teaching part time at Rowland Hall in Salt Lake City, Borup entered a Master's Degree program at the University of Utah. While at the university, she studied under Utah artists Paul Davis and Sam Wilson. She completed her Master of Fine Arts in painting and drawing in 1992.

Connie M. Borup's awards include the following: 1987 Utah High School Art Teacher of the Year; 2nd Place for the oil Desert Storm, at the 1990 Springville Annual Salon; Purchase Award from “Utah 92,“ painting and sculpture at the University of Utah; Finalist for the 1994 Utah Visual Arts Fellowship Award.

Connie Borup's work is represented by Phillips Gallery in Salt Lake City; Gail Severn Gallery in Sun Valley, Idaho; and Coda Gallery in Palm Desert, California. She currently lives in Salt Lake City and spends most of her time painting and teaching drawing at the University of Utah.

About her own work, Borup comments,

At the center of my creative drive there has always been a connection with nature as a pure force. I am interested in the austere, lonely qualities of country not touched by the human desire to control. This lack of reference to civilization presents us with a slightly portentous, yet peaceful, landscape. It is frail, yet ordered: severe, yet inviting: linked to both place and memory. Land forms which hold potential for describing the mysterious aspects of our existence have become my visual vocabulary. Painting allows me to reconstruct reality in ways that reveal my emotional and psychological make-up. The images that I select reflect this inner world and my sense of life.

About her piece A Compromise Of Freedom And Control, Connie Borup comments,

I am interested in a person's appearance based on his/her outside image. There is a conflict between what people choose to see from the outside and the collection of complicated emotions and thoughts that really exist inside a person.

Biography courtesy Springville Museum of Art.