Most of Maria Downey's life is still a mystery. She is a California based artist and former teacher who was active in the California avant garde scene beginning in the 1960s. Little is found on her, though it appears she was a member of the College Art Association with whom she exhibited in the mid 1990s, and she received a fellowship from the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Monoghan, Ireland to study printmaking in the early 1990s. In 1993 through 1998 she was associated with a collective of nine artists in Thousand Oaks, California who exhibited together in a space they managed called Gallery 9.

She's listed in the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art section of the Archives of American Art. Much of her work is concerned with social realism.

 Selected solo exhibitions: Mt. Berry College, Mt. Berry, Ga., October 1-31, 1995. "Images of EI Salvador," oil and pastel; Seraphic Gallery, Silverlake, Calif., November 17-December 17, 1994. "City of Lost Angels," paintings; Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, CA, June 1998. "A Classic Competition", a pastel, "Campesinos on Strike" (noted in the LA Times).