Born in Omaha, Nebraska, she lived in Elkhart, Indiana during her childhood and attended the University of Chicago, receiving a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1912.
[1] In the 1920s, according to the historian Alan M. Wald, she was married to Kenneth Durant, the head of the United States branch of the Soviet press agency TASS.
The following year, Rivera was invited to the United States, and in 1931, he was the subject of a retrospective at New York City's Museum of Modern Art.
Writing essays for the Virginia Quarterly Review, she wedded politics to cultural criticism as she recounted her travels through Europe as a literary agent, telling firsthand of the distinctly Russian character of train journeys to the Caucasus; a 1920s Berlin in the midst of rising Nazism; government wiretapping and the antiquarian book trade in London.
She demonstrated an eagerness to expand her network of colleagues, collaborators and companions, and she engaged in correspondence with Walker Evans, Cornell Capa and Jean Renoir.