Holly Roberts earned an M.F.A. from Arizona State University, Tempe, in 1981. Her work is nationally and internationally exhibited and has been published in five monographs. She has twice received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. In January of 2018 her work was exhibited in a one person retrospective at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA, called 33 Years. In 2024 Roberts will have a 40 year retrospective at MOPA (Museum of Photographic Arts) called Storyteller: Holly Roberts.

Her first Monograph was Holly Roberts: Untitled 50, published by the Friends of Photography in 1989. Next came Holly Roberts: Works 1989-1999 published by Nazraeli Press, and in 2009 they published Holly Roberts: Works 2000-2009. In 2018 the Griffin Museum of Photography published another monograph called Holly Roberts: 33 Years, and in 2020 Candela Gallery published a catalog of her show with the gallery called Holly Roberts. A dedicated teacher as well as a prolific artist, she has had a profound effect on a community of artists around the country. She continues to live and work in the Southwest.