Michelle Grabner was born in Oshkosh, WI. She currently lives and works in Oak Park, IL and Waupaca County, WI, and is Professor and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Grabner is also a senior critic at Yale University in the Department of Painting and Printmaking.

Her work is included in the following public collections: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MUDAM - Musée d'Art Moderne Luxemburg; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC.

Grabner, and her husband Brad Killam, founded The Suburban (est. 1999) and the Poor Farm (est. 2009). The Suburban is an artist-run project space in Oak Park, Illinois. Over the past 13 years The Suburban has hosted projects by numerous major and emerging artists, including Ceal Floyer, Nicholas Gambaroff, Lucie Fontaine, Luc Tuymans, Katharina Grosse, Ann Pibal, and Katrin Sigurdardottir.

The Poor Farm is a not-for-profit exhibition space in rural Waupaca County, Wisconsin. In 2012–13 the Poor Farm is exhibiting Tracking The Thrill, a focused selection of Gretchen Bender's (1951–2004) video works, including the re-staging of the video performance Total Recall. A catalog published by Poor Farm Press with essays and interviews by Stuart Argabright, Amber Denker, Michelle Grabner, Tim Griffin, Carla Hanzal, Robert Longo, Peter Nagy, Lane Relyea, David Robbins, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Philip Vanderhyden accompanies the exhibition.

She is also a corresponding editor for X-TRA, a quarterly art journal published in Los Angeles since 1997. Her writing has been published in Artforum, Modern Painters, Frieze, X-TRA, Art Press, and Art-Agenda among others.