Cleary received her bachelor's degree from Washington University in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri.

In 1970, shortly after graduation, Cleary moved to Washington, D.C. where she worked at the University of the District of Columbia as a professor for thirty years.

Cleary's style of art is realistic; it is said that she would often win awards for her work in the photography category by mistake.

Cleary was born on November 14, 1942, in St. Louis, Missouri with her identical twin sister, Shirley Cleary-Cooper.

Her father was a general practitioner in St. Louis and brought home almost every disease and epidemic that hit the city.

[1] After a year in Rome, Cleary finished her graduate studies and received her MFA in 1968, at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

She worked in a reductive, layered fashion, covering the whole paper in graphite and then using erasers to flesh out the image.

This allowed the subject to come into focus slowly, as the graphite was layered with the aid of tissues and blending stumps.

Cleary created her images from multiple photos, taken from different angles, a habit she developed during college when models weren't readily available.

In one memorable piece Untitled, Cleary painted two life-size rats (green and soft pink) serving her as she reclined nude on a divan while smoking.

Some of her art is frank and bold, like her series of large oil paintings from the early 1990s that studied male genitalia.

Beverly Court housed artists such as Allan Bridge, Yuri Schwebler, Jonathan Meader, and Angelo Hodick.

Cleary would host dinner parties for the building, and a communal living arrangement of sorts took place.

In 1981, Cleary was briefly married to a man named Tommy Iven Hansen, who was a young art student from Denmark.

Cleary's attacker was invited to Washington, D.C. for a show on Kazakhstan art in 1998, but was luckily denied entry into the United States.

The news was hard to take for Cleary, but she believes because of an affidavit she signed with the State Department upon returning from Kazakhstan, he was turned away.

[14] Cleary met her second husband, F. Steven Kijek, a dancer, in Baltimore at a party after a gallery opening.