She was born in New York City to Dr. Arthur Wharton Swann and his wife Susan Ridley Sedgwick.
[3] During her teenage years, she spent her winters learning to ski with Otto Fürer in St. Anton am Arlberg in Austria.
It illustrates a scene from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book—the panther Bagheera hunting an owl by night.
Among these were the Royal Dutch Airlines sculpture at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City; and Screaming Eagle (1951) at the Federal Reserve Bank Building Annex in Detroit, Michigan.
The latter piece, designed at the request of architect Minoru Yamasaki, is an abstract American bald eagle constructed of welded brass rods.
[15] She created the Fountain of Noah (1954) at the Northland Center, a shopping mall in Southfield, Michigan; interior sculpture at the Toffenetti Restaurant in Chicago, Illinois; and a mural of Boston Harbor with glazed terra cotta reliefs of sea creatures (1960s) at the Harbor National Bank on Franklin Street in Boston, Massachusetts.
[16][17] In 1945, as part of the Red Cross Arts and Skills Unit rehabilitation program, she taught returning soldiers to model and fire ceramic sculpture.