Born in 1969 in Columbia, South Carolina, and currently living in Los Angeles, Rodney McMillian received his BA in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia and went on to study art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002. McMillian's work has been exhibited at the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Herning Art Museum in Denmark, the Royal Academy in London and Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art.