Margrethe Odgaard was born in 1978 on the peninsula Thyholm in Denmark, and she lives and works in Elsinore. After graduating her MFA in textiles from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design in 2005 with additional studies at Rhode Island School of design in USA, she worked two years as a printing assistant at The Fabric Workshopand Museum in Philadelphia, USA, followed by seven years as a textile designer in the French fashion company EPICE. She has received national and international awards and recognition for her work, which she unfolds in exhibitions as well as commercial collaborations with clients such as Kvadrat, Muuto, Montana, Ikea, and Hay.In 2016 she was awarded the prestigious Torsten & Wanja Söderberg Prize, and in 2015 she recieved The Danish Art Foundation’s 3-year working grant. Among other collections, her work is included in the museum collections of Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York, Designmuseo Helsinki, Röhsska Museum of Art and Craft, and Designmuseum Denmark.As a consequence of her dedicated work with colours, Odgaard has developed several colour indexes. Colours precede form in the understanding of objects; according to the Institute of Colour Research in USA it takes less than 90 seconds to perceive an object, and between 62 and 90 percentage of the interpretation is based on the colours alone.
In addition to running her own studio, Odgaard is one of two Founders of the company Applied Colour Tools Aps in 2020, which is dedicated to help bridging colour theory and practice for architects and designers