Leslie Allen (b. 1954) is an American painter based in Sausalito, California, whose deep roots in the borderlands of New Mexico and Texas shaped her earliest sense of beauty and sensory connection to the world—an aesthetic awakening she traces back to the creative encouragement she received there as a child.

Allen's path to painting wound through several lives. In 1974, she moved to San Diego, where she began capturing the Pacific light in tight, luminous watercolors. As a young mother, she worked as a federal courtroom clerk while studying drafting, graphic design, and prelaw—until a move to Mill Valley in 1980, made in search of better opportunities for herself and her child, led to a job at Lucasfilm Ltd. and the chance to keep studying alongside her work.

It was in the late 1980s that a teacher urged her toward oils and to “go big”—with her brushes, her substrates, her expression. Allen threw herself into the study of contemporary abstract and figurative painting, anatomy, and photography, hosting drawing groups in her Sausalito studio and drawing on the influence of Bay Area abstract expressionism together with the immediacy of plein air work. Mentors like Karen Frey, Mark Adams, Thomas Marsh, Tron Bykle, and especially Chester Arnold left a lasting mark on her range and her love of art-making itself.

In 2008, Donna Seager Gallery gave Allen her first solo exhibition, launching a representation that lasted until Seager Gray Gallery's closure in 2024. Today her improvisational, intuition-driven style extends beyond canvas: a late-blooming cellist, she resumed music after a fifty-year gap and has played with the College of Marin Symphony Orchestra since 2015, now hoping to find an expressive abstraction on cello that rhymes with her progression as a visual artist.

Her work is represented by Kennedy Contemporary (Newport Beach), Lori Austin Gallery (Sonoma), and Donna Seager Gallery (San Rafael).