[1][2][3] Born Lillian Malkin in New Jersey in 1912,[note 1] Storm de Hirsch left home at an early age to pursue a career in the arts in New York City.

[5] In addition to making films, de Hirsch taught at Bard College[6] and New York's School of Visual Arts.

[3][4] Much of de Hirsch's work is abstract and employs experimental techniques such as frame-by-frame etching and painting and metadiagetic editing.

"[14] Her use of technical devices such as painting and etching directly on the film stock has been called pioneering, although those techniques had been used before by Len Lye, Stan Brakhage, and others.

Stan Vanderbeek called The Tattooed Man "a major work in terms of style, structure, graphic invention, image manipulation and symbolic ritual.

[2] Shirley Clarke, noting that Goodbye in the Mirror focuses on female characters and their reactions to a series of events, called it the first "real woman's film";[18] Wheeler Winston Dixon cites it as an "example of early Feminist cinema that led to the later work of Yvonne Rainer, Jane Campion, Sally Potter, Julie Dash and others.

In 1967, Film Culture published "A Conversation: Shirley Clarke and Storm de Hirsch," in which the two women discussed gender and art.