Renate Bernal, painter and printmaker, was born in Munich, Germany on 3 February 1937. She and her mother immigrated to the United States when she was just thirteen years of age. They settled in New York where Renate attended school. After attending Cooper Union in New York City, she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and a Masters in Art Education from Brown University. Bernal was interested in the graphic arts and, while at SFAI, she studied with Nathan Oliveira between 1956 and 1959. She worked with ink drawing, woodcut, and oil painting throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Bernal began working in acrylic airbrush on canvas in the late 1960s. It allowed her to create a similar feeling as working with oil. This became the primary medium throughout the subsequent decades for her larger abstractions. She continued to work with pastel and charcoal, and later explored ink drawings. Renate married at least twice, using the last names of her husbands: Pysh and Stevens.

Bernal's work has been exhibited in San Francisco; Providence, Rhode Island; New York City and many cities in upstate New York. She is represented in the permanent collection of the Binghamton University Art Museum. Renate Bernal Stevens is currently retired in Binghamton, New York.