Born in Upstate New York of mixed African-American and Native American (Mississauga Ojibwe) heritage, she worked for most of her career in Rome, Italy.

According to the American National Biography, reliable information about her early life is limited, and Lewis "was often inconsistent in interviews even with basic facts about her origins, preferring to present herself as the exotic product of a childhood spent roaming the forests with her mother's people.

Lewis and her aunts sold Ojibwe baskets and other items, such as moccasins and embroidered blouses, to tourists visiting Niagara Falls, Toronto, and Buffalo.

Samuel's endeavours in the California gold rush proved successful, and by the time Edmonia got to college, he "supplied her every want anticipating her wishes after the style and manner of a person of ample income".

I was then sent to school for three years in [McGrawville], but was declared to be wild—they could do nothing with me.However, her academic record at Central College (1856–fall 1858) shows that her grades, "conduct", and attendance were all exemplary.

[26] During the winter of 1862, several months after the start of the US Civil War, an incident occurred between Lewis and two Oberlin classmates, Maria Miles and Christina Ennes.

Shortly after, Miles and Ennes fell severely ill. Doctors examined them and concluded that the two women had some sort of poison in their system, supposedly cantharides, a reputed aphrodisiac.

News of the controversial incident spread rapidly throughout Ohio and was universally known in the town of Oberlin, where the general population was not as progressive as that of the college.

While Lewis was walking home alone one night she was dragged into an open field by unknown assailants, badly beaten, and left for dead.

Although most witnesses spoke against her and she did not testify, Chapman moved successfully to have the charges dismissed: the contents of the victims' stomachs had not been analyzed and there was, therefore, no evidence of poisoning, no corpus delicti.

She repeatedly told a story about encountering in Boston a statue of Benjamin Franklin, not knowing what it was or what to call it, but concluding she could make a "stone man" herself.

[41] When she met Union Colonel Shaw, the commander of an African-American Civil War regiment from Massachusetts, she was inspired to create a bust of his likeness.

[46] From 1864 to 1871, Lewis was written about or interviewed by Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Peabody, Anna Quincy Waterston, and Laura Curtis Bullard, all important women in Boston and New York abolitionist circles.

[37] Because of these women, articles about Lewis appeared in many important abolitionist journals, including Broken Fetter, the Christian Register, and the Independent.

[48] I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art culture, and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color.

[34]The success and popularity of the works she created in Boston (particularly the reproductions of her bust of Shaw)[50] allowed Lewis to bear the cost of a trip to Rome in 1866.

[45] She received professional support from both Charlotte Cushman, a Boston actress and a pivotal figure for expatriate sculptors in Rome, and Maria Weston Chapman, a dedicated worker for the anti-slavery cause.

[55] Lewis spent most of her adult career in Rome, where Italy's less pronounced racism allowed increased opportunity to a black artist.

[56] She began sculpting in marble, working within the neoclassical manner, but focusing on naturalism within themes and images relating to black and American Indian people.

She insisted on enlarging her clay and wax models in marble herself, rather than hire native Italian sculptors to do it for her – the common practice at the time.

Lewis also was known to make sculptures before receiving commissions for them, or sent unsolicited works to Boston patrons requesting that they raise funds for materials and shipping.

[70] The grave was in front of the grandstand of his Harlem race track in the Chicago suburb of Forest Park, where the sculpture remained for nearly a century until the land was bought by the U.S.

Later, Marilyn Richardson, an assistant professor in the erstwhile The Writing Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and later curator and scholar of African-American art, went searching for The Death of Cleopatra for her biography of Lewis.

[50] Richardson, after confirming the sculpture's location, contacted African-American bibliographer Dorothy Porter Wesley, and the two gained the attention of NMAA's George Gurney.

[73] According to Gurney, Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian American Art Museum,[74] the sculpture was in a race track in Forest Park, Illinois, during World War II.

[80] In 2017, a GoFundMe by East Greenbush, New York, town historian Bobbie Reno was successful, and Edmonia Lewis's grave was restored.

As a black artist, Edmonia Lewis had to be conscious of her stylistic choices, as her largely white audience often gravely misread her work as self-portraiture.

[82] In her 2007 work, Charmaine Nelson wrote of Lewis: It is hard to overstate the visual incongruity of the black-Native female body, let alone that identity in a sculptor, within the Roman colony.

As the first black-Native sculptor of either sex to achieve international recognition within a western sculptural tradition, Lewis was a symbolic and social anomaly within a dominantly white bourgeois and aristocratic community.

Created in 1867, it commemorates the abolition of slavery in the United States two years earlier and takes its title from President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.