Maria da Graça Pinto de Almeida Morais was born in Freixiel, Vila Flor, on March 17, 1948. She lived in Mozambique between 1957 and 1958, and then returned to Vieiro the following year. In 1966, she enrolled in the Porto School of Fine Arts to study painting, completing her course in 1971 and presenting her 5th-year evaluation exhibition at the Porto School of Fine Arts. In 1974, she exhibited for the first time at the Alberto Sampaio Museum in Guimarães.
On April 19, 1974, her daughter Joana Andrea Pinto Morais Lopes da Silva, a filmmaker, was born in Guimarães. This was from her first marriage to the painter Jaime Lopes da Silva, also known as Jaime Silva. In 1975, she participated in the International Art Encounters of Viana do Castelo. She co-founded the Puzzle Group with eight artists and an art critic, collaborating on collective exhibitions for two years.
Between 1976 and 1978, she lived in Paris as a grantee of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, where she met artists Eduardo Arroyo and Bernard Rancillac and deepened her study of the works of Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne. In May 1978, she held a solo exhibition at the Portuguese Cultural Center in Paris.
In 1983, she began her professional relationship with gallery owner Manuel de Brito and exhibited at Galeria 111 in Lisbon and at the Abade de Baçal Museum in Bragança. In 1984, she exhibited at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art: “Maps and the Spirit of the Olive Tree,” presenting her works beforehand at the National Society of Fine Arts in Lisbon. She exhibited twenty drawings at Árvore and participated in the exhibition “Eleven Young Portuguese Painters” at the German Institute in Lisbon, curated by Rui Mário Gonçalves. In 1985, she presented the same exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. The same series, along with the “Eroticism and Death” series, was featured in an exhibition at the University of Granada. The monograph “Graça Morais, Earth Lines” by António Mega Ferreira (Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda) was
