Foley-Ray earned a B.A. from Colorado College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. She has studied figurative and conceptual ceramic sculpture independently with Arthur González. She has taken sculpture classes from Jean Van Keuren (Davis Arts Center), Arnold Zimmerman (Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass, Colorado), Gayla Lemke, and Barry Rose (Art Students League of Denver). Marie EvB Gibbons (Marie EvB Gibbons Studio) played a pivotal role in Foley-Ray's ceramic development.
Foley-Ray's early sojourns led her to Cortona, Italy, as an artist-in-residence for the University of Georgia's Study Abroad Program. Fellowships from the University of California, Davis, and Colorado College allowed her to analyze her Rastafari ethnographic data, explore their decolonizing diasporic philosophy and create several bodies of artwork that highlighted their Africanity. Fieldwork took her to Jamaica, Botswana, and the midwestern and southern United States. Always, she seeks the African roots of contemporary diasporic African cultural manifestations. The Redline Contemporary Art Center and The Logan School for Creative Learning residencies provided opportunities to push aesthetic boundaries that gave her time to start her current body of ceramic quilts that privilege Octavia E. Butler's literary legacy. This body of work will serve as a portal through which viewers can witness how Butler insisted on putting people of color in the future while masterfully weaving connective tissue between issues of identity, racism, classism, gender, ageism, and ableism in time and space.
As an anthropologist, artist and educator, she strives to teach and understand the complex vision diasporic Africans create for themselves and all of humanity in the twenty-first century.
