She grew up in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, after being born in Chelsea, New York, and graduated with a B.F.A. from Cornell University in 1963. She received an M.F.A. in Painting at Manhattan’s Hunter College, where she studied with the painter and sculptor Tony Smith. She had her first one-woman show in New York City at the André Emmerich Gallery. Her work then was strongly in the mode of Lyrical Abstraction. The 1969 canvas Spiked Red (collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) demonstrates her ’60s approach: close hues, bright color waves, and bursts. She was invited to participate in the influential 1970–1971 Lyrical Abstraction exhibition, which traveled the country and culminated at the Whitney Museum of American Art.