Brian Rego received his BFA in Painting at the University of South Carolina after being selected for the Ed Yaghjian Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Work in 2004. By 2007, he received his MFA in Painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he encountered painters who shared his interest in observational painting. Rego soon co-founded a painting collective appropriately named “Perceptual Painters” to continue working, exhibiting, and teaching with this community of painters. Over the past 17 years, Rego has been devoted to teaching art through multiple institutions such as the University of South Carolina, the College of Charleston, the University of Mississippi, the Jerusalem Studio School, Art New England at Bennington College, and Mt. Gretna School of Art. He also co-founded and ran the Midlands School of Art, which offered exploration of materials and visual perception. 

In his work, Rego combines invention and memory with the sense of sight and components from the observable world to make his paintings. As he works directly from the motif, his paintings result in the accumulation of personal experience and narrative that embody themselves as symbols of his interior world. Rego has been featured in the book Art in the Making, Essays by Artists About What They Do, and has been recognized as an artist of high achievement in observational painting through the prestigious Blackwell Prize in Painting from the University of West Georgia. Rego is represented by Evoke Contemporary in Santa Fe, NM, Carver Hill Gallery in Camden, ME, and Steven Francis Fine Art He resides and works in Charleston, South Carolina.