Sue Fuller, painter, printmaker, sculptor and teacher, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on 11 August 1914. Her formal training began at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where she studied under regionalist Joe Johns. During the summer of 1934, Fuller enrolled in a summer course with Hans Hoffman at the Ernest Thurn School. She graduated from the Carnegie Institute with her BA degree in 1936 and then enrolled at the Columbia University Teachers’ College where she received her MA degree in 1939.

Fuller traveled throughout Europe in the summer of 1937, where she visited the Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition in Munich. Already a student of Modern Art, the works on view proved to be a source of inspiration despite the intention of the exhibit. In 1943, Fuller was in New York and worked with Stanley William Hayter at his experimental workshop, Atelier 17, at the New School. She assisted in the production of prints by artists such as Andre Masson and Marc Chagall, and later she returned as an experimental artist in her own right.

In 1943, Fuller taught at the Museum of Modern Art’s Children’s Classes. She also studied design with Joseph Albers who introduced her to experimental weaving, the fundamentals of which would cross over into her printmaking techniques. While working at Atelier 17, Fuller experimented with adding textures to the soft grounds of her intaglio plates. In 1944, her work was included in the Museum of Modern Arts seminal exhibition Hayter and Studio: New Directions in Gravure, and in 1949, she was given a solo exhibition of her three-dimensional weavings and experimental, abstract lace-making constructions at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery of Contemporary Art in New York City. She was represented by the gallery until the late 1960s.

Fuller received a Tiffany Fellowship in 1948, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Grant in 1950, and the Carnegie Mellon University Alumni Award of Merit in 1974. She was awarded the Women’s Caucus for Art Honor in 1986.

She was a member of and exhibited with the Society of American Etchers, the Society of American Graphic Artists, and the Artists Equity Association. She taught at the University of Minnesota, University of Georgia, Columbia University Teachers’ College, Pratt Institute and the Museum of Modern At.

Her work is represented in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; the Museum of Fine Arts Boson, Massachusetts; the Fogg Museum of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Tate Gallery, London; the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania; and the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Sue Fuller died in Southampton, New York on April 19, 2006.