Printmaker, painter, and founder of the first print gallery-workshop in the U.S., Contemporaries Graphic Art Centre (now the Pratt Graphic Art Center), Margaret Lowengrund was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1902. In the 1920s she attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and traveled to Paris to study painting with Andre L'Hote, showing at the Salon d'Automne, and to England to study lithography with A.S. Hartick. Upon her return to the US in 1928 she held her first solo exhibition at the Kleeman-Thorson Galleries in New York.  Her early professional graphic art career included illustrating articles for The New York Evening Post and Philadelphia's Evening Public Ledger. 

With the onset of the Depression, Lowengrund studied with Joseph Pennell at the Art Students League and worked for the WPA producing social realist lithographs, focusing on the working class and touching on the struggles of the poor. In the 1940s these images would make her a target of Michigan congressman George Dondero's "red scare" witch hunt. Undeterred, Lowengrund continued to pursue her art career and was hired on as director of the National Academy of Design School of Fine Arts from 1950-'51. She would then go on to receive grants from the Rockefeller Foundation to open the Contemporaries Gallery in 1952 and then Contemporaries Graphic Art Centre, the first venue of its kind in the United States, in 1955. Backed by the Pratt Institute, Lowengrund cultivated the Centre to include a modern gallery space that would feature leading American and international printmakers, many of whom she would invite to teach at the adjacent workshop. While operating the Centre as director, gallerist, and printer, she also found time to work as associate editor of Art Digest magazine. Lowengrund is seen today as a key player in the post-war revival of prints as an art form.

Lowengrund's own fine art career continued throughout, and she exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Print Club, the ACA Galleries, and more. In 2023, a major exhibition of Lowengrund's art, career, and the work of the artists who were involved at the Centre was held at the Print Center New York, titled A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries, organized by Christina Weyl and Lauren Rosenblaum.

Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Newart Museum of Art, and many more.