Born 1957 in Johannesburg.

She studied at the Michaelis School of Art, UCT, where she obtained a Bachelor of Fine Art degree (1979), an Advanced Diploma in Fine Art (with distinction) and a Masters in Fine Art (with distinction). She was awarded a Doctorate of Literature by UCT in 2007.
Presently she is Professor of Fine Art and Director of the Lucy Lloyd Archive, Resource and Exhibition Centre at the Michaelis School of Fine Art.

Skotnes held her first solo exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in 1981 and is represented in many South African and public collections overseas.
In 1993 she received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award and won also the UCT Book Award for “Sound from the thinking strings” (1991), a visual, literary and archeological consideration of the life of the /Xam in the period of their extinction.

Skotnes’ enduring interest has been the history, culture, cosmology and imagery of the San, the earliest inhabitants of southern Africa.

She has produced a considerate amount of visual work on the subject and published series of books and articles about the San culture, including “Miscast: negotiating the presence of the Bushmen” (1996), which accompanied a major exhibition on the colonial history of the San at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, and “ Heaven’s things” (1999).

Her latest publication is “Claim to the country” ( 2007). It contains the archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek, who were pioneering colonial scholars, recording the stories of San men and women in Cape Town in the 1870s.

A strong sense of history and tradition infuse Skotnes’ visual images, but the connections she makes between past and present imbue her work with contemporary significance.