[1] Through her father's connections as a journalist, Elise Asher met many intellectuals notable in Chicago during her childhood, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, who stayed in their home.

[1] She attended the Art Institute of Chicago[2] and in 1934 she graduated from Simmons School of Social Work.

In the New York Herald Art Exhibition Notes announcing the show, she is described as "a self-taught painter...who writes poetry and paints in the non-objective contemporary trend.

She was married to the artist Nanno de Groot, and later to the poet Stanley Kunitz, whose poetry featured in some of her works.

Asher died from complications from a broken hip at her Greenwich Village home on 8 March 2004, aged 92.