[2] Lupe Cotrim completed her secondary education at Des Oiseaux School[3] and graduated in Library science and Culture at the Sedes Sapientiae Institute in São Paulo.

[4] Between 1961 and 1963, Lupe Cotrim presented, together with journalist Joaquim Pinto Nazário, the TV program A Semana Passada a Limpo,[a][5] in which they discussed the week's events in the fields of politics, literature, and arts.

Previously she produced and presented, together with writer Helena Silveira [pt], the program Mulher, Confidencialmente,[b] both aired on São Paulo television channels.

"[12] In correspondence with the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, his friend and interlocutor, Lupe Cotrim said that: I entered the faculty of Philosophy, the one I had been in love from afar for years.

[12]At the same university, Lupe Cotrim started her doctorate in Aesthetics,[13] under the guidance of Gilda de Mello e Souza [pt], with research on the poetics of the French writer Francis Ponge, however, as a result of her premature death – in 1970 due to cancer – she did not finish it.

According to the poet and critic Cesar Leal, regarding Cotrim's style, "her cultured, sober and aristocratic language uses symbols and metaphors with surprising economy of words".

[17] Lupe's debut book, Monólogos do Afeto (1956), with illustrations by Darcy Penteado,[18] was well received by the critics and considered one of the main poetry releases of the year.

[25] In partnership with José Arthur Giannotti, Cotrim also translated the essay Sciences humaines et philosophie by the French philosopher and critic Lucien Goldmann.

[26] After Lupe Cotrim's death, two more of her works were published: Obra Consentida (1973), composed of a selection of poems from her first five books, and the anthology Encontro (1984), organized by a critical review by the teacher and poet Cacaso.

[32] In her readings, Lupe Cotrim went into areas such as literature, philosophy, and the social sciences, studying texts from psychoanalysis, Simone de Beauvoir's essayistic feminism, and works by authors such as Michel Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Karl Marx, Heidegger, and Lévi-Strauss.

[38][7][39] Her remarkable performance facing the challenges of the newly created USP unit and, at the same time, the adverse political conjuncture the country was going through mobilized the students to honor her, naming, in 1970, the school's academic center Centro Acadêmico Lupe Cotrim (CALC).