Jean Elizabeth Slater [née Decker], painter and printmaker, was born to Elmer Owen and Irma Decker on 17 October 1914 in Lincoln, Nebraska. She grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and graduated from the Central High School in Tulsa. Decker moved to Los Angeles, California to study at the Chouinard Art School which had been founded in downtown Los Angeles in 1921 and eventually became the Chouinard Art Institute. From California, she moved east to New York City where she studied under Jean Charlot at the small, progressive Florence Cane School of Art located in the R.K.O. building at Rockefeller Center. Charlot taught classes in fresco and lithography at the school.

Decker returned to Tulsa and was married on 28 May 1936 to Willard Francis Slater. The couple moved to Southern California in 1937 and were residing in San Gabriel in 1940. During her time in Southern California, she exhibited with the Stendahl Galleries in Los Angeles in 1938 and at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa in 1941. She moved to Marin County in Northern California in 1964 and eventually settled in San Anselmo. Exhibitions of her work were featured at the Corwith Gallery in San Francisco in 1964 and at Dominican College in San Rafael in 1980.

Jean Decker Slater died in San Francisco on 23 July 1993.