Major work included an eight-foot bronze statue of the Hawaiian Queen Lili’uokalani, for a site between the Hawaii State Capitol and Iolani Palace, which she used as the subject matter of Search for the Queen, a 1996 documentary she produced on the life of her subject and the sculpture-making process.

Other significant work includes the figure of a seated woman in The Accusative, for a site in the Honolulu, Hawaii offices of the Commission on the Status of Women.

[citation needed] She made her first plasticine torso by eight years old, was teaching a summer camp art class by age 15, as well as taking drawing lessons on the weekend.

She studied with Carl Milles in the summer of 1942 at the Cranbrook Academy of Art; with Simon Moselsio, 1942–1943 at Bennington College; with Raymond Puccinelli from 1943 to 1945 at the University of California, Berkeley; with Oronzio Maldarelli from 1945 to 1946 at Columbia University; and with Ossip Zadkine in Paris from 1949 to 1950.

[citation needed] Pineda developed her sense of adventure by traveling with her mother in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and to such far-flung places as Galapagos, the Marquesans, Polynesia and New Guinea.