Mary Borgman was born in 1959 in St. Louis. She earned a BFA in graphic communications from Washington University in St. Louis 1982. She then went on to earn her MA and MFA from Fontbonne University in St. Louis in 2001. In 2002, Ann Nathan Chicago began representing her artwork at annual exhibitions in the gallery and art shows in New York, Chicago, Florida, and Santa Fe. Borgman was a semifinalist at the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in 2009 at the National Portrait Gallery in the Smithsonian Institute, which led to her own exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Seven of Borgman's large-scale charcoal drawings were exhibited for ten months in a show called Portraiture Now: Drawing on the Edge. Her National Portrait Gallery show then moved from the Smithsonian Institute to the Arkansas Art Center.
In addition to numerous articles and reviews, including in ArtNews Magazine, her art was recently published in Drawing Magazine's charcoal issue, Charcoal Gaze (winter issue, 2016). Borgman is included in various public collections, including the 21C Museum in Louisville, the Tullman Collection in Chicago, and the Mott-Warsh Collection in Flint, Michigan. Her artwork has been shown in the Arnot Art Museum in New York, the Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, the Mitchell Museum in Illinois, and the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in St. Louis.