[1] From 1949 to 1972, her father, Jorge Abad, represented the lone district of Batanes for a total of five nonconsecutive terms in the Congress of the Philippines.

Her mother, Aurora Abad, served for one term (1966 to 1969) in the same elected position as her husband after he was appointed secretary of public works and highways by President Diosdado Macapagal.

[2] During that time, she also began organizing student demonstrations protesting brutal tactics employed in the 1969 general election, including those used in Batanes, where her father was running for another term.

Although nobody was harmed, following the incident, Abad was encouraged by her parents to leave the country and continue her law studies in Spain.

[2] While supporting herself with two jobs, working as a secretary during the day and as a seamstress at night, Abad took up a graduate program in Asian history at Lone Mountain College.

In 1973 she completed a doctoral dissertation on The role of Emilio Aguinaldo in the acquisition of the Philippines by the United States from Spain: 1898.

[5] At the Art Students League, Abad concentrated on still life, and figurative painting under John Heliker and Robert Beverly Hale.

[2][6] In 1973, while at a regional World Affairs Conference in Monterey, California, Abad met Jack Garrity, a graduate student at Stanford studying international finance.

[3] During this time, Abad traveled the region, learning about Indigenous art techniques and traditions, as well as encountering refugee camps, the experiences later informing her work as an artist.

Towards the end of 1979, Abad was painting from the material she gathered and, by April 1980, she exhibited the 24-painting-series Portraits of Kampuchea, also known as the Cambodian Refugee series, at the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art in Bangkok.

She then began incorporating into the surface of her paintings materials such as traditional cloth, mirrors, beads, shells, plastic buttons and other objects.

It recently resurfaced at León Gallery, Legazpi Village, Makati Central Business District, when an anonymous owner purchased it with a description “a memory of her backyard in Batanes.”[11] After a three-year battle with lung cancer, Abad died in Singapore on December 7, 2004.

[12][13][14] In 2019, Tate Modern exhibited Abad's 3 quilted canvas works - "Bacongo III-IV" (1986) and "European Mask" (1990).