[1] Dusti Bongé, née Eunice Lyle Swetman, was the youngest of three children born to a prominent Biloxi, Mississippi, banking family.

When she was young, Bongé was attracted to the arts and wrote, produced, directed and acted in plays starring other neighborhood children on the wide gallery of the family's beachfront home.

Because her passion for acting was frowned upon by her family, she struck a deal that if she first completed college she would be allowed to go to a drama school.

[2] She graduated from Blue Mountain College in northeastern Mississippi, going on to Lyceum Arts Conservatory in Chicago, where she studied acting and played bit parts on the stage.

[5] Bongé moved back to her home town of Biloxi in 1934 after she and Arch decided they did not want to raise Lyle in New York.

After Arch's death from Lou Gehrig's disease in 1936, Bongé sought solace in the studio where they had worked together and began to paint seriously.

[3] Bongé's early work depicted scenes of Biloxi, partly inspired by Archie’s renderings of the waterfront and cityscape.

[9] The Betty Parsons Gallery opened in New York in 1946, and Dusti forged a relationship with the Abstract Expressionist dealer who would represent her for many years.

As a New York Herald Tribune critic noted in 1960: “Dusti Bongé, artist of the deep south, appears at the Betty Parsons Gallery with forceful and determinedly non-objective paintings.

Her canvases are extremely vigorous, dark-keyed and spacious.”[3] Her final show at the Parsons gallery was in 1975, but she continued to create a very strong body of work, including some monumental oil paintings, through the next decade.

In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.