She was the first African-American graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1918 and later studied at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the early 1920s.

In 1934, Prophet began teaching at Spelman College, expanding the curriculum to include modeling and history of art and architecture.

When she was 15 years old, Prophet used her small earnings from a part-time housekeeping job to pay for art tutoring.

[2] In 1915, during her sophomore year, Prophet married Francis Ford, who had briefly attended Brown University.

Prophet arrived in Paris in August of either 1921 or 1922 and obtained a studio on Avenue du Chatillon in Montparnasse.

In the fall of 1922 or 1923 to the spring of 1924 or 1925, she studied with Victor Joseph Jean Ambroise Segoffin at the École des Beaux-Arts, a sculptor noted for his statues, tombs, and portrait busts.

She later left the École because she believed she could teach herself faster than working under a supervisor, and she bought her own sculpting tools, doing all the carving with no assistance due to her lack of funds.

[7] In November 1925, she described feeling soothed from her anxiety and depression while sculpting the head of a man she met in a café.

[8] Her polychromed wood head Discontent [9] reflected what she described as "a long emotional experience, of restlessness, of gnawing hunger for the way to attainment" during this time in her life.

It is evocative of medieval church statuary and provides nostalgia for the Middle Ages in French art.

In this new studio, she created her sculpture Prayer (or Poverty), a nude woman in contrapposto, with her right hand on her breast, her head thrown back, and a snake slithering between her ankles resting on her legs.

[4] Her wooden sculpture Congolaise imitates noble conflict and "speaks to the ancestral legacy articulated by Locke and Du Bois" during this time.

[14] Prophet moved her studies down to Atlanta, Georgia, and began a career as a professor teaching art students enrolled at both Atlanta University and Spelman College in 1934,[3][15] in hopes of encouraging the creative minds of youth, the encouragement she was not presented with during her early years.

[14] In 1945, Prophet returned to Rhode Island to escape the racial segregation and rejection she had faced in the South.

She attempted to regain her status as an artist but had to turn to other employment, including in a ceramics factory and as a domestic work.

Near the end of her life, Prophet faced an internal conflict about her identity involving her dual ancestry.

[16] The diaries which served as the source material for the performance, cover Prophet's twelve years in France, and are currently held by Brown University’s John Hay Library.