Jo Ganter received the Fine Art MA (hons) from The University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art. In 1989/90, she was a Scholar at The British School of Rome. She returned to Scotland and continued her artistic career while teaching at Glasgow School of Art in the Departments of Printmaking and Historical and Critical Studies before joining Edinburgh College of Art as a member of staff in 1995. She received a Boise Scholarship, and Fellowship from the KALA Arts Institute, in 1994,allowing her to travel and work in print studios in New York and Berkeley for six months. In 2003, she was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy. Ganter has had many solo exhibitions, including A.I.R. Gallery in New York in 2000, The Talbot Rice Gallery in 2003, and the Academy Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania in 2011. In 2010 she was invited to make work at George Mason University in Washington and at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she was a professor in 2011. Jo has published articles in journals on printmaking and pedagogical issues surrounding craft and art.
Recent research activity has seen Ganter collaborate with the Head of Music, Raymond MacDonald, and American jazz pianist, Marilyn Crispell, to produce series of images that function as graphic scores. Graphic scores replace traditional music scores to direct musicians through images. A major aim of the project is for the visual art work and the musical composition to be equal products of the collaborative process, and of equal importance to the audience when performed/presented. The work has been exhibited and performed in 2014 at the Talbot Rice Gallery, and in Hangzhou, China as part of Impact 9 International Print Conference. In August 2017, new work by Ganter, MacDonald and Crispell, will be exhibited and performed at the Kleinert James Center for the Arts in Woodstock, New York. Ganter also animates the graphic images to coordinate with recordings of the music played in response to them.