"[5] She attended school at Sarah Lawrence College but left after two years, entering the Art Students League where she studied under Dadaist George Grosz and Modernist Morris Kantor.

[5] In New York Sekula befriended American poet Carl Sandburg and met the surrealists in exile during 1942.

It was during this time that she became part of an international circle of artists, writers, choreographers, and composers in New York in the 1940s, when she was in her early twenties.

[10] In 2016 her biography was included in the exhibition catalogue Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum.

Through the group she also became close friends with poet Charles Duit, sculptor David Hare, and Alice Rahon.

In April 1951, the day after the opening of her third exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery, Sekula suffered a breakdown and had to be taken to the psychiatric clinic of the New York Hospital in White Plains by Manina Thoren and Joseph Glasco.

Sonja Sekula was also extremely open about her homosexuality, and made frequent references to it in her writings and journals.

In one entry, she wrote the following:1960: "Let homosexuality be forgiven, let us hope that she will be welcome in the Greek mythology and protected by pagan nature gods as well for most often she did not sin against nature but tried to be true to the law of her own - To feel guilt about having loved a being of your own kind body and soul is hopeless - let us hope there were many pure moments in each of these attractions and loves - into which the realm of sphere and eternity and silence entered as well.