Diane Burko was born in New York, studied painting and art history at Skidmore College (BA, 1966), and then moved to Philadelphia to pursue an MFA in painting at the University of Pennsylvania (MFA, 1969). She has lived and worked in Philadelphia ever since. D. Burko has had a life-long engagement with the landscape, its meaning and the impacts of human interactions with it. Her early work often integrated mirror and window motifs into observed landscapes as though seen through airplane windows, car mirrors and other modes of transportation. These works simulate multiple experiences of travelling through or above a landscape using high-keyed colours and jarring shifts of perspective. They seem to be as much about the body’s integration into space as they are about moving through the land. In the mid-1970s D. Burko began ambitious, often monumental paintings and drawings, focused on specific named sites that revealed evidence of deep time and the relationship between the inside of the Earth and what is visible on the surface. Works such as Grandes Jorasses – Pointe Marguerite (1976), a painting nine feet across, which depicts the massive mountain range between France and Italy as though the viewer is suspended in mid-air and observing the highest pinnacles in profile from a distance.

In 1977–78 she based paintings and drawings of the Grand Canyon and locations in the south-western USA on photographs she took during flights over the sites with artist James Turrell (1943–). D. Burko’s fascination with mountains, glaciers and massive features in the land manifested in vertigo-inducing paintings that honour the majesty of their subjects but also convey the emotional experience of their scale relative to the painter’s eye. Over the next few decades D. Burko painted volcanoes and waterways, and continued her examination of the landscape both locally (including series based in Philadelphia and Bucks County, Pennsylvania) and in Iceland, Italy and France. She was already concerned with evidence of human impacts on the land, but by 2008 she had begun a direct engagement with the subject of climate change and the environmental impacts of human activity. This has led D. Burko to research the causes, history and current scientific findings of this existential threat. She has since collaborated with environmental scientists, presented her work in contexts outside of the art world and expanded her practice beyond painting to include collage, lenticular imagery, video and an expansion of her photography. She has travelled the world to witness the first-hand threats at hot spots of the climate crisis, meeting and listening to people on the front lines, including glaciologists and Indigenous leaders. D. Burko’s engagement with climate change is an extension of her feminist viewpoint. A founding member of the Women’s Caucus for Art, D. Burko has been an organiser for equity and the visibility of women and nonbinary artists since 1972. She has been a dedicated mentor to younger generations of artists throughout her career.

D. Burko is Professor Emerita at the Community College of Philadelphia where she taught for many years. She has received many grants and awards, from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Leeway Foundation and the Independence Foundation. In 2011 she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art. Her work is in the collections of the Delaware Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and many others.