Odom was born and grew up in Ahoskie, North Carolina, where his parents nurtured his interests in drawing and in dolls. He majored in fashion illustration at Virginia Commonwealth University and pursued some graduate studies in England before moving to New York City in 1975.

His distinctively elegant Art Deco-like style quickly established him as a successful commercial artist, at first via erotic illustrations for sexually-oriented magazines such as Blueboy, Viva, and Playboy, the last of which named him their "Illustrator of the Year" in 1980. In the same year, he provided the cover art for Edmund White's novel Nocturnes for the King of Naples, which opened his path to a wider audience.

During the 1980s, his work achieved success in many commercial media. He created album covers for CBS Records and book covers for numerous other novels, usually in the genres of fantasy, mystery, or horror. He provided illustrations for the science/science-fiction magazine OMNI and (in 1989) a front cover for Time magazine. He also received professional recognition from his peers, receiving the Society of Illustrators's Gold Medal (Editorial category) in 1982 and a Silver Medal (Book category) in 1987.

In 1990, he renewed his childhood interest in dolls by designing the face for Mdvanii, a 25cm limited-edition collector's fashion doll. ^[1] Inspired by the glamour of Hollywood's golden age from the 1920s through 1950s, he then designed the 15.5" Gene Marshall doll, which made its debut at the 1995 Toy Fair and created a wider market for large, fully-articulated collector's fashion dolls, which until then had been mainly limited in the mass market to the slightly smaller and less flexible Barbie doll. ^[2] Since then, Odom has largely concentrated his professional pursuits on the Gene Marshall doll, regularly modifying her design to create new variations and creating similar companion dolls to share her world, such as Gene's "co-stars" Madra Lord, Violet Waters, and Trent Osborn.

He continues to attend doll collectors' conventions to make personal appearances and buy dolls for his own collection, as well as to support charitable causes. Of his early friends in the art world, he estimates that two-thirds of them died of AIDS in the 1980s before the awareness and treatment of the disease became better known. At a 1997 doll convention entirely devoted to Gene Marshall, a charity auction of uniquely modified Gene dolls raised more than $30,000 for Gay Men's Health Crisis, an AIDS service organization.