Mildred Marion Coughlin, painter, printmaker, illustrator, and scenic designer, was born 16 July 1892 to James M. and Mary Welter Coughlin in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Her father was the superintendent of the public school system in Wilkes-Barre and she graduated from the Wilkes-Barre High School in 1910. She received her B.A. degree from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and then furthered her studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. While in New York she studied at the Art Students League.

Coughlin married Patterson McNutt, author, actor, playwright, producer, and screenwriter, on 12 January 1924 in Luzerne, Pennsylvania. The couple lived in New York before moving to Los Angeles in 1930.

As a printmaker, Coughlin made etchings while in France and New York but during the 1930s she produced a number of lithographs depicting and gently poking fun at the Hollywood movie scene. She captured the hot lights and crowded set in Hollywood Close Shot and Behind the Cameras, the glitz and glamour of the Hollywood starlets in The Great Ziegfeld, and haute boredom of the coifed patrons in Trocadero. In her distinctive drawing style, she rendered daily life at the Los Angeles Farmers Market and race day at Santa Anita racetrack. The Los Angeles-based printer Paul Roeher is known to have printed some of her lithographs. Coughlin also made a series of etching depicting the game of golf, also in her deftly humorous style.

Coughlin was a member of and exhibited with the Society of American Etchers, the Chicago Society of Etchers, the Southern Printmakers, and the California Society of Etchers. Her work is represented in the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Mildred Marion Coughlin McNutt died in Sonoma, California on 3 December 1984.