Eric Avery entered medical school at UTMB with a degree in art in 1970. He completed his psychiatry residency in 1979 at The New York State  Psychiatric Institute. 

For 40 years Dr. Avery worked at the intersection of visual art and medicine. For 25 years he was a faculty psychiatrist at UTMB. As a member of the Institute for Medical Humanities at UTMB, he made art that reflected his work as an HIV psychiatrist. He is married to David Paar MD, who was one of the Infectious Disease faculty at UTMB. 

He has made prints since his childhood in Pecos, Texas. As an artist physician he expanded the boundaries of printmaking to include clinical art actions in art museums. He retired from clinical practice in 2012. 

He lives and works as an artist activist in San Ygnacio, Texas, a small South Texas border community near Laredo. He has had many exhibitions and is widely collected in museums in the United States. Currently two of his HIV related prints are in Melinda Narro’s exhibition Do No Harm: Artists Confront Health Crises at the Houston Museum of Fine Art. In 2027, the British Museum is including his Stash House print in their traveling exhibition Masterpieces of Printmaking 1465 to Now. 

His website is www.docart.com