Lorraine O'Grady (September 21, 1934 – December 13, 2024) was an American artist, writer, translator, and critic. Working in conceptual art and performance art that integrates photo and video installation, she explored the cultural construction of identity – particularly that of Black female subjectivity – as shaped by the experience of diaspora and hybridity. O'Grady studied at Wellesley College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before becoming an artist at the age of 45. Regarding the purpose of art, O'Grady said in 2016: "I think art's first goal is to remind us that we are human, whatever that is. I suppose the politics in my art could be to remind us that we are all human."

O'Grady was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 21, 1934, to Jamaican parents, Edwin and Lena O'Grady, who helped establish St. Cyprian's, the first West Indian Episcopal church in Boston. Drawn to the form and aesthetics of the "high church" of nearby St. John's of Roxbury Crossing, O'Grady recalled: "I was permanently formed by the aesthetics of that experience, of the rituals, which are a more stately and elegant version of Roman Catholicism. I did believe until my mid-twenties, until my sister [Devonia] died, then I stopped believing."

In 1955, O'Grady graduated from Wellesley College, where she majored in economics and minored in Spanish literature. While at Wellesley, she was one of three Black women in her class; she told The New York Times that this trio of girls was "totally invisible". She married her first husband, Robert Jones, with whom she had a son, while she was in school. She was later honored with a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award in 2017. After graduating from Wellesley, O'Grady worked in the Labor and State Departments as an intelligence analyst.

She pursued a master's degree in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before becoming an artist in 1980. While in Iowa, she met her second husband, Chappelle Freeman Jr. The two moved to Chicago in 1967, consequently forcing her to drop out of the MFA program. While in Chicago, O’Grady operated a translation agency, specializing in seven languages. Her clients included Playboy and the Encyclopedia Britannica.

O’Grady then moved to New York in 1973, becoming a music critic for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice.

O'Grady died at her home in New York City on December 13, 2024, at the age of 90. She was eulogized by Andil Gosine as "a singular force".

In 1977, O’Grady began her “Cutting Out the New York Times” works: she collaged together clipped phrases from the newspaper; the rearranged words took on different meanings and formed miniature poems.

In the early 1980s, O'Grady created the persona of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, who invaded art openings wearing a gown and a cape made of 180 pairs of white gloves, first giving away flowers, then beating herself with a white studded whip, which she often referred to as, "the whip-that-made-the-plantations-move". While doing this, she would often shout in protest poems railing against a segregated art world that excluded black individuals from the world of mainstream art, and which she perceived as not looking beyond a small circle of friends. Her first performance as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire was in 1980 at the Linda Goode Bryant's Just Above Midtown gallery in Tribeca.