Holly studied painting and printmaking at UC Santa Cruz and printmaking at the Royal College of Art, London. She has had solo shows in London, Manila, Edinburgh, Seattle, Santa Rosa, Santa Jose and San Francisco, and participated in group exhibitions and biennales around the world.

She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Arts Council, the Greenshields Foundation of Canada, and the Phelan Awards Foundation for Printmaking. An elected member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, U.K., her work is in many public collections, including the Achenbach Foundation, Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; Stanford University, California; Portland Museum, Oregon; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK; British Arts Council; Scottish National Gallery of Art; Hawaii State Art Museum, Hilo; Bibliotheque Nationale Paris and Chi-ba Art Museum, Japan.

"My interest in mezzotints began in the early 1970s when I was an art student at UC Santa Cruz and tried to emulate the beautiful Mezzotints of Avati and Hamaguchi that I saw reproduced in printmaking books. However, there were no books, no teachers, and virtually no U.S. practitioners. I was stymied, yet intrigued. Certainly the sensuous velvety blacks captivated me, but also the elegant simplicity and purity of the technique. The ability to be in total control of tonal gradations, limited only by the pressure of my hand, rather than the whim of the etching acid, was satisfying. But above all, this medium had the capacity to imbue my simple still life images with a reserved strength and beauty which I could obtain in no other way.

"To achieve the subtle qualities of tone I spend many hours "rocking" a copper plate with a mezzotint rocker until the plate has thousands of tiny holes, each with a bit of raised copper burr. These burrs hold a tremendous amount of ink, and a fully rocked plate prints a rich velvety black unparalleled in any other print medium. To obtain an image, I scrape the surface of the plate, variously lowering the surface of the burrs so they will hold less ink and thereby yield gradations of dark and light. To print white, the plate must be scraped and burnished to an absolutely smooth surface. To grasp this manner of working, think of covering a sheet of drawing paper with charcoal and erasing out an image."