Mara Lindqvist is a painter working in acrylic and oil, currently based on the coast of Maine. She studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, earning her BFA in 2011. She went on to complete an MFA in painting at Boston University. There, she worked closely with painter Lois Dodd during a visiting critic residency, an encounter she cites as formative in pushing her toward direct observation and a pared back palette. She also studied under longtime faculty painter John Walker, whose decades of coastal Maine work shaped her early interest in landscape as subject.

After graduate school, Lindqvist spent two seasons as a studio assistant to painter Alex Katz in New York. The experience sharpened her sense of scale, flatness, and the discipline of working in series. She later attended a summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, followed by a shorter working residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Her technical grounding in both acrylic and oil traces back to this period. It was then that she began treating the two mediums as distinct tools, rather than a hierarchy of sketch versus finish.

Her paintings have been shown in group exhibitions across New England, including in Portland and Rockland, Maine, and are held in private collections throughout the region. Lindqvist now maintains a small home studio on the coast. She continues to paint primarily en plein air in warmer months, and works from those studies through the winter.