She was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1961 and has resided in New York City since 1984. Called a “Physical Abstractionist” by Roberta Smith for The New York Times in 1996, her work has evolved from pure abstraction, through a form of narrative representation, to a personal iconography that combines abstracted landscape and urban elements in paintings that are formally rigorous, deceptively simple, and almost sculptural in intent. Her work is a mixture of her two lives as she spends part of each year in rural Canada near her roots and the rest in the dense environment of the city. As David Brody for ArtCritical.com in 2010, put it: “Hard-nosed Canadian empiricism and Brooklyn grit seem to combine in Belcourt’s work.”