Edward Corbett, painter, printmaker, and teacher, was born on 22 August 1919 in Chicago, Illinois. His father was an Army cavalry officer so he spent his first nine years in El Paso, Texas; and then lived in Fort Huachuca, Arizona; the Philippines; and Dayton, Ohio. Corbett was thirteen years-old when he had his first art lessons at the Dayton Art Institute. Between 1937 and 1941, he attended the California School of Fine Arts [CSFA] in San Francisco.

In 1941, Corbett was drafted into the army during World War II but received a medical discharge a year later and spent two more years in the merchant marines as a chief master at arms. Upon his discharge, he spent a year in New York before returning to San Francisco. Corbett taught at CSFA between 1947 and 1951, and he also taught an advanced drawing and painting course at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1951, he moved to New Mexico where he was director of the Taos Field School of Art, University of New Mexico.

Corbett was chosen as one of fifteen artists for the 1952 exhibition of painting and sculpture, Fifteen Americans, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition contained ten of his compositions in chalk and casein and one oil.

In 1953, Corbett joined the faculty as Assistant Professor of Painting at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. For the next decade he divided his time between Taos, New Mexico and Provincetown. Later, he made his home in Washington, D.C.

Corbett was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968. His work is represented in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; the Art Institute of Chicago Illinois; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico; and the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Edward M. Corbett died 6 June 1971 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. A retrospective of his work was held at the Richmond Art Center in California from September 1990 to March 1991.