Jane Mackay was born in London, studied at the Westminster Medical School, and worked as a volunteer in Papua New Guinea, and later as a GP in Southwark. She relinquished medicine at the millennium to pursue her artistic career full-time, a parallel career that was always prolific, but which evolved along an unconventional path. As a synaesthete, the painting of images evoked by music has been a continual vital source of creative inspiration.
 
She has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, including festivals in Salisbury, Aldeburgh, Ludlow, and Tewkesbury, at the Royal Northern College of Music, and the Royal School of Church Music. Her work has been shown in London at Wigmore Hall, St John’s, Smith Square, and at Abbey Dore in Hertfordshire as part of English Choral Experience. During 2000–2001, she was Artist in Residence with Cambridge University Musical Society, holding two solo shows in Cambridge.
 
Jane has featured widely in the national press, and specialist music magazines. She co-founded Sounding Art Press to produce a major study of Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw (2007), and other artworks featured in Anna Ginter’s Vladimir Nabokov and his synaesthetic world (Lotz University Press, 2015). Jane has participated in films for the Handel House Museum, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Icon Films (Channel 4) and a documentary for South Korean TV (2008). Other TV appearances have included Horizon, Come To Your Senses with Adam Hart-Davis (both BBC 2), This Morning with Richard and Judy (Granada), the Child of Our Time series (BBC1) and a BBC4 Prom Concert (both 2006).
 
Commercial CD covers, book jackets and greetings cards for The Musicians Benevolent Fund, the Bach Choir, Hyperion, Collins Classics, Oxford University Press, Boosey & Hawkes, and the Boydell Press have all featured her work. In August 2016, she gained her MFA from the University of the Arts, London, and undertook design projects with the Swedish company Photowall. In February 2019, in collaboration with Siobhán Doyle and the Lir Quartet, she launched a new festival Aesynth at the In-Spire Galerie, Dublin, celebrating synaesthesia through art, music, film, and the spoken word. A large-scale commemoration in art of the fiftieth anniversary of Britten’s death is planned for 2026.