Genara Fernandez Banzon received her degree in editorial design from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts (1974), and her MFA in Performance and Studio and InterRelated Media from the Massachusetts College of Art (1992). These learning tracks weave into her continuing involvement in development communication and embedded work in community contexts. In light of this path, she has served as Co-Director of the Harvard Special Programs (2004–2006) and also in various capacities as artist-advocate for bodies like the Jasmine Asian Women’s Giving Circle, Shattuck Shelter Organization-Advocate for the Homeless in Boston, the Asian American Task Force Against Domestic Violence and the Massachusetts Immigration and Refugee Advocate.

G. Banzon spent a significant proportion of her impressionable years in the rustic environs of the science-focused Philippine university campus from which her National Scientist father taught. She marks this biographical aspect of her milieu as influential in how her art developed conceptually and how a keen sense of ephemeral potency and materiality enabled her to imagine and challenge the promises and limits of space and medium in the formulation of contemporary art parameters across the decades of her practice. She is amongst the few Filipino artists who one might consider as having creatively navigated the intersections of otherwise polarised terrains of social realism and conceptualism. Her subsequent engagements with progressives involved in the anti-Martial Law movement of the Philippines in the 1970s–80s, with international feminist advocates, and exposure to and immersion in support organisations directed at addressing the plight of migrants and socially disadvantaged groups, similarly surface in her image-making and her negotiations with the semiotic possibilities and difficulties implicit in media-based work juxtaposed against natural and found material. She is most cited for work that deploys this multi-faceted aspect, as seen amongst those shown in her first solo exhibition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (1983), and untitled installations in Five Directions: A Major Exhibition in Philippine Art Directions, Museum of Philippine Art (1980), and Fiber as Art, Metropolitan Museum of Manila (1980).

She has received recognition through awards and grants from such bodies as the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2023), Australia and Regions Artists Exchange (1987); Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) Contemporary Art Museum (1988); and the CCP Thirteen Artists Award (1976).
Banzon’s exhibition history includes key participation in projects such as (dis)ORIENTED Shifting Identities of Asian Women in America, Steinbaum Krauss & The Henry Street Settlement Abrons Art Center, NYU & Queens College (1995); BOSTON (In Dialogue) NOW Exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Art-Boston (1994); The Fuller Museum Seventh Triennial (1993); and the 3^rd Asian Art Show, Fukuoka Art Museum (1989).  Her bibliographic citations include: Five Asian American Contemporary Artists, Asian-American Department University of Massachusetts, Boston and Umass Amherst (2000), and (dis) ORIENTED: Shifting Identities of Asian Women in America Exhibition Book, Henry Street Settlement Abrons Art Center/ Steinbaum Krauss Gallery (1995).