Blanch Lazzell was born near Maidsville, West Virginia on October 19, 1878.  She studied at West Virginia Wesleyan College, South Carolina Co-Educational Institute, West Virginia University, and the Academie Morderne.  She studied with William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League in New York City. 

She established a studio in Provincetown, MA in 1915 and spent most of her summers and many winters there for the next forty years.  She learned the white-line woodcut technique there and became the acknowledged master of the technique, which she also taught in Provincetown.  

From 1923 to 1925 she studied in Paris with Albert Gleizes, Andre Lhote, and Fernand Leger.  Her subsequent prints reflect the cubist aesthetic she encountered while in Paris.

In 1933 she moved to Morgantown West Virginia, where she worked for the WPA and continued to create her abstracted, Modernist white-line woodcuts.  She died there on June 1, 1956.