Emily Leonard Trenholm was born in 1982 in Portland, Maine. She studied art and art history in Florence, Italy, in 2003 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from the University of New Hampshire in 2005. After graduating, she spent time living in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and then moved back East to complete her master's degree in Painting from Boston University in 2011. 

While in graduate school, Trenholm was encouraged to work from nature and refined her ability to see and internalize color relationships. She studied Albers' color theory and began using a limited palette to explore the visual energy and spatial relationship of color. Drawn to the tangle of natural forms, she experimented with the effects of graphically woven lines in her landscape paintings. This inclination for weaving became sculptural when she started cutting up painted canvases and weaving them back together. In 2017, she studied fiber at Haystack Mountain School of Craft, which led her to explore tapestry weaving. 

Trenholm’s landscape paintings are dense and luscious, filled with energetic color relationships she senses and observes. Her palette vibrates with sometimes-neon strokes that weave together forest imagery. Sweeping movements of line and detailed tonal relationships are what produce her unique visual language. Her canvases combine drawing and painting as she creates her images with both oil stick and the brush, resulting in paintings that gradually reveal an intimate portrait of the land. 

Trenholm paints outside, within the woods that surround her home in Brunswick, Maine. She built a studio platform, a few hundred yards from her house, which provides a stable studio floor as she works directly from nature.

Since 2022, Trenholm has been the curator of an annual women's exhibition at the Ice House Gallery on North Haven Island that brings together artists from Maine and beyond to foster meaningful conversations and create community. 

Trenholm is an adjunct professor of art and spends her free time mountain biking, boating, and skiing with her two sons and husband. Her work is in public and private collections, including Boston University, Zillman Museum of Art, Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, Drummond Woodsum, and Sovereign Bank, among others. Trenholm is currently an Artist in Residence on Hurricane Island, and the recipient of the SOLO Competition at Broomfield Gallery, Monhegan Artists’ Residency, and Great Spruce Head Island Residency.