Award winning artist Ilona Radelow has been a Californian since 1959, when as a teenager, she migrated from Ohio. An early career as a wife, mother and equestrian occupied much of the next two decades. However, she found time to study fine arts at the University of California at San Diego extension (whose studios were then the La Jolla Art Center, now the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art) with such luminaries as William Bowne, Richard Allen Morris, Martha Longnecker, John Baldassari, Fred Holly and Winefred Higgins.

In addition to numerous acceptances into juried exhibitions at the La Jolla Art Association (LJAA), the artist's works were featured in a two-person exhibition at the LJAA in 1985. In 1987 her work appeared in the Annual Award Show of the LJAA, the Southern California Exposition and the Escondido Art Association's Juried Exhibition, receiving third place honors. In 1988, her work was selected for the Midsummer Awards Show of the San Diego Art Institute (SDAI) and was also featured in the SDAI International Juried Exhibition, where she was the recipient of the Grumbacher Golden Award. The decade culminated in the winter of 1989 with her first one-man show at the SDAI.

The former San Diego Art Institute Vice President and board member now resides in Escondido, California where she trains for upper-level competitive dressage and produces her commissioned equine portraits along with other works, out of her ranch studio. Within the last three years, her work has been accepted into many juried exhibitions at the Escondido Arts Partnerships. Her work was also featured at the Ninth Juried Exhibition at the Antheneum Music and Arts Library of La Jolla, CA where she was one of nineteen artists selected out of more than four hundred entrants. She was also invited to exhibit her life size oil portrait of the Dutch Warmblood K-2, the One and Only, at the Hollywood Park Turf Club for the winter 2000 racing season.

Ilona's work has appeared in The Guards Polo Official Yearbook, Polo Quarterly International, Equine Images, Equine Vision and Riding Magazine.