After immigrating to the United States in 1940, she taught at Pond Farm and wrote three influential books—Pottery: Form and Expression (1959), The Invisible Core: A Potter's Life and Thoughts (1973), and ...that We Look and See: An Admirer Looks at the Indians (1979).

[3][4] Wildenhain was born on October 11, 1896, in Lyon, France,[5] to a British mother, Rose Calmann and a German father, Théodore Friedlaender, who was a silk merchant.

Beginning in 1914, she studied sculpture at the Berlin University of the Arts, then worked as a decorator of porcelain ware at a factory in Rudolstadt.

[8] In 1926, she left the school and moved to Halle-Saale, Germany, where she was appointed head of the ceramics workshop at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design.

The same year, she married a younger ceramic artist named Frans or Franz Wildenhain (1905–80), who had earlier been her classmate at the Weimar Bauhaus and served as her apprentice at Burg Giebichenstein.

In advance of the Nazi invasion, Wildenhain was able to leave Holland in 1940 and to emigrate to New York, but her husband's concurrent request was denied.

[8] After gaining U.S. citizenship in 1945, Wildenhain was able to fund and to sponsor the emigration of her husband (who, in the years of their separation, had been drafted into the German army).

She also published three books (Pottery: Form and Expression; The Invisible Core: A Potter's Life and Thoughts; and That We Look and See: An Admirer Looks at the Indians), lectured at schools throughout the U.S., and took solo expeditions to South and Central America, Europe, and the Middle East.