[3] In 1932, the DeFeo family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where her father graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and became a traveling doctor for the Civilian Conservation Corps.

An important early mentor was her high school art teacher, Lena Emery, who took her to museums to see works by Picasso and Matisse, opening up a new world to the young artist.

[4][6] In her artwork, she resisted what she called "the hierarchy of material", using plaster and mixing media to experiment with effects, a thread one can see running through the art of that time, especially on the West Coast.

After receiving a BA and MA from UC Berkeley, DeFeo won the Sigmund Martin Heller Award which allowed her to travel to Europe in October of 1951.

At first they lived on Bay Street in San Francisco, close to the California School of Fine Arts, where DeFeo worked as an artist’s model.

[4] Early in 1955, DeFeo was featured— along with Julius Wasserstein, Roy De Forest, Sonia Gechtoff, Hassel Smith, Paul Sarkisian, Craig Kauffman, and Gilbert Henderson—in a group exhibition, "Action", independently curated by Walter Hopps in Santa Monica, where the featured paintings were installed around the base of a working merry-go-round.

[4] The artist Billy Al Bengston remembers DeFeo as having “style, moxie, natural beauty and more ‘balls’ than anyone.”[3] Hedrick, Deborah Remington, Hayward Ellis King, David Simpson, John Allen Ryan, and Jack Spicer founded The 6 Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street, at the location of the King Ubu Gallery, which had been run by Jess [Collins] and Robert Duncan.

[11] In 1959, DeFeo was included in Dorothy Canning Miller’s seminal exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, alongside Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Louise Nevelson, among others.

[13] Selected by Thomas Hoving for his book Greatest Works of Art of Western Civilization, this masterwork stands over 3.2 meters (10.5 feet) tall and weighs over a ton.

[4] Her friend Bruce Conner stated that an “uncontrolled event” was necessary to force her to finish this work, and he documented its removal from her apartment in a short film titled The White Rose (1967).

She wrote, “I do believe that more so than most artists, I maintain a kind of consciousness of everything I’ve ever done while I’m engaged on a current work.”[20] DeFeo often made her artwork in series, exploring, for example, light and dark versions, as well as mirror opposites.

At times her artwork took off from a small quotidian object, such as a dental bridge or swimming goggles, transforming the everyday into something with “universal character.”[21] During the 1970s, DeFeo took a particular interest in photography.

When DeFeo won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1973, she bought a Hasselblad camera and built a darkroom in her home, continuing to explore photography and photo collage for several years.

[4][26] Separated from Bogdanoff and teaching at Mills College, she moved to Oakland in 1981 and built out a large live/work studio where she continued to expand on her ideas through painting, drawing, photocopy, and collage.