Torrez believes that the greatest influences on her work were the circumstances of her childhood and teenage years: "My life has influenced me to look deeper to find the beauty and humanity in people and places. Even at an early age, I knew I was an artist".
Known for her color work, Michelle Torrez does expressionistic oil paintings of figures that are intended to communicate the beauty of unlikely emotion, movement and life.
Born in Denver, Colorado, Torrez is the oldest of four children from a working class family. Caring for her younger siblings while her parents worked, she would sit on the porch and draw to pass the time. "The other children would come around to watch, and art soon became a way of making friends for me". Instead of playing with other children, she drew them on computer paper her father brought home from his job at IBM.