Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1952, Angela Grauerholz has lived and worked in Montreal since 1976. A graduate of the Kunstschule Alsterdamm, Hamburg, in graphic design, she studied literature and linguistics at the University of Hamburg and holds a Master's degree in Fine Arts (photography) from Concordia University, Montreal. In 1980, she was a co-founder of ARTEXTE, centre d'information en art contemporain, still today an important archive for Canadian art, where she worked until 1986. Simultaneously, until the late 1980s, she was very active as a graphic designer specializing in catalogue and book design. Since 1988, she has been teaching at the École de design, Université du Québec à Montréal, where she was the director of the Centre de Design from 2008 to 2012. Having influenced and taught many generations of graphic designers in Quebec, she has received numerous awards for her design work, such as the Award of Excellence (Best of Best) from the American Federation of Arts, New York, for the book Lisette Model, published by the National Gallery of Canada in 1990, and has worked for many distinguished artists and art institutions across Canada. In 2006, Grauerholz was awarded Quebec's Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas for her accomplishments in the arts, and in 2014 she received the Canada Council's Governor General Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Grauerholz's photographic work has been exhibited and collected nationally and internationally. She has participated in many international events of distinction, including the Biennale of Sydney, Australia (1990), documenta IX, Kassel, Germany (1992), and the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, USA (1995). Solo exhibitions of her work have included Angela Grauerholz: Photographien at the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (1991), Angela Grauerholz: Recent Photographs, exhibited at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1993), and a survey exhibition organized by the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, which was first shown there in 1995 and then travelled in Canada and Europe (1995–96). Another notable solo exhibition was Angela Grauerholz: Sententia I – LXII, which opened at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1999. Sententia I – LXII was also shown with Schriftbilder at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, and at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago (1999–2000). Her Privation series of photographs was exhibited as part of the Biennale de Montréal (2002) and presented the same year at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.
In 2003, Angela Grauerholz: Reading Room for the Working Artist and Privation were shown at the Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston. Reading Room for the Working Artist was also exhibited in 2006 at VOX, Contemporary Image Centre, Montreal, in 2007 at The Ottawa Art Gallery in the exhibition Re-reading, and in 2008 in Memory Palace at the Vancouver Public Library. VOX produced and launched her web work www.atworkandplay.ca in 2009. In 2010 the National Gallery of Canada in collaboration with the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (CMCP) mounted a major exhibition of her work which was subsequently shown at the University of Toronto Art Center in 2011.