Natalka Husar was born in 1951 in New Jersey to Ukrainian immigrant parents. She graduated from Rutgers University in 1973 and that same year moved to Toronto where she lives and works. Since 1990 she has been an Associate Professor at OCAD University. 

Husar has exhibited extensively across Canada, is represented in numerous public collections including the National Gallery and has received support from the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, and SSHRC. Her themes in painting since the 1980’s have been of identities in displacement, haunted by an obliterated homeland and the fates of those left behind.  Her last body of work, a painted history play in 3 acts titled Burden of Innocence, circulated on a 5 venue museum tour 2009-2011. Organized by the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre in Guelph, in collaboration with McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound and the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina, the exhibition was accompanied by two hard-cover publications— an artists book and the Husar Handbook.