O'Hara is a conceptual New York-based artist who lived in Europe (Paris, Berlin, Italy) for 25 years. In her early work, she tracked her own activities and movements through calendars, graphs, charts, and maps. In 1989, she began the series for which she is best known: the Live Transmission drawings, which she refers to as "performative drawing." Holding a pencil in each hand, she tracks, in real time, the movements of another person, whether an actor, conductor, musician, chef, secretary, or doctor. "If a person makes a gentle movement, a delicate line is drawn. If the action followed is forceful or violent, a correspondingly vigorous line is made.... This is not automatic drawing, but its opposite, requiring great concentration and focus." In her titles, she provides details of the sources of her graphic notations, making plain the connection between her abstract, two-dimensional compositions and the temporal and spatial events that inspired them.