[2] Hirsch grew up in a Montreal Jewish community in the mid-1940s, reading and learning from the Torah in Hebrew and Yiddish at an early age.

To help her endure these physical and emotional assaults, Hirsch read "... the great philosophers, writers, early feminists, Freud and Jung, all included in the floor to ceiling library of my parents' small apartment.

Then in 1973, Hirsch joined the art department at California State University Dominguez Hills in Los Angeles, and obtained tenure in 1978.

[8] She also named and facilitated the Joan of Art Seminars, (originated by June Wayne), teaching artists the business aspects of their professional careers.

"[11] In 1974 Hirsch brought the life and work of Canadian artist Emily Carr to the attention of the American academic community at the College Art Association, Washington, DC.

She introduced her painting and its related philosophical explorations at the Menninger Foundation's annual conference on consciousness in Council Grove, Kansas (1982).

[14] In 1985 Hirsch received a senior artist grant from the National Endowment for the Arts,[16] which – with a sabbatical from California State University – facilitated her year-long travel in Asia.

[4] In December 1986 she met Ngawangdanhup Narkyid (Kuno), the official biographer of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, initiating a friendship that would prove to be life-changing for the artist.