Born in a small farming community in West Virginia, Lazzell traveled to Europe twice, studying in Paris with French artists Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, and André Lhote.

She was one of the founding members of the Provincetown Printers, a group of artists who experimented with a white-line woodcut technique based on the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

Her father was a direct descendant of Reverend Thomas and Hannah Lazzell, pioneers who settled in Monongalia County after the American Revolutionary War.

She grew up on the 200 acre (0.81 km2) family farm, attending a one-room schoolhouse on the property where students from the first through eighth grades were taught from October through February.

[9] She enrolled in the Art Students League of New York in 1908 where she studied under painters Kenyon Cox and William Merritt Chase.

Lazzell boarded the SS Ivernia on July 3, 1912, bound for Europe on a summer tour arranged by the American Travel Club.

She attended lectures by Florence Heywood and Rossiter Howard, avoided the cafe life, and joined the Students Hostel on Boulevard Saint-Michel.

[16] In April she visited an ear specialist who removed a growth from the back of her throat, resulting in what she characterized as "a slight improvement" in her hearing.

Lazzell extended her stay in France and attended lectures at the Louvre concerning Flemish paintings, Dutch art and the Italian Renaissance.

[16] Lazzell took a morning outdoor painting class that summer from Charles Webster Hawthorne at his Cape Cod School of Art where she was exposed to Fauvist color and technique.

[22] Lazzell returned to Provincetown the following summer and requested that painting instructor, Oliver Chaffee, teach her the white-line woodcut technique innovated by B.J.O.

[28] Although the bohemian atmosphere of Provincetown contrasted with Lazzell's church-going conservative demeanor, she wove herself into a tight circle of friends, including Ada Gilmore, Agnes Weinrich, and Otto Karl Knaths.

[29] In 1919 Lazzell was featured in an exhibition in Manhattan at the Touchstone Gallery alongside Weinrich, Mary Kirkup, and Flora Schoenfeld.

Later that year, the Provincetown Printers were featured at the Detroit Institute of Arts exhibition "Wood Block Prints in Color by American Artists".

[30] Critics and galleries associated the Provincetown Printers with modernist schools of painting [28] and the artist collective continued to receive national exposure over the next few years with exhibitions in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans.

[31] Lazzell turned her old fish shack into a personal space and built large flower boxes around her studio, allowing morning glory and Madeira vines to grow up to the roof.

[32] Lazzell returned to Europe in 1923 with Tannahill and Kaesche, touring Italy and spending two months in Cassis before settling in Paris late that summer.

While in Paris Lazzell studied Cubism and geometric abstraction alongside Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and Albert Gleizes.

Lazzell was a member of the international arts group Société Anonyme and was asked by artist and patron Katherine Dreier to be on its board of directors in 1928.

These and her abstract works incorporated elements of both Synthetic and Analytic cubism and frequently comprised arrangements of vibrantly colored geometric shapes.

Although she was a pioneer in the white-line woodcut technique and played a role in the development of abstract art in the United States, Lazzell's work faded into obscurity for a time.