Selma Gubin, painter and printmaker, was born in Kiev, Russia to Benjamin and Dora Gubin on 1January 1903. Her family immigrated to the United States in 1909 and she became a naturalized United States citizen on 1 January 1918.

Gubin studied at Hunter College, the Art Students League, and New York University. Her teachers included John Sloan, Bryon Brown, Raphael Soyer, and Boardman Robinson. Gubin acquired a hot dog stand on Rockaway Beach in 1933 that allowed her time to paint. She was employed by the Work Progress Administration Federal Art Project between August 1935 and June 1941, in the Art Teaching Division and in the Murals Division. She also gave private art lessons and managed the summer Timberline Camp at Jewett, New York.

She was a member of New York Artists Equity Association and the National Association of Women Artists. She was conferred the F.W. Weber award by the National Association of Women Artists. Gubin’s art was exhibited at the Municipal Art Gallery in 1938, the ACA Gallery in New York in 1941 and the Woodstock Artists Association in 1955.

The work of Selma Gubin is represented in the collections of the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of the City of New York; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington.

Selma Gubin died on 17 June 1974 in New York City. A retrospective exhibition of her oil paintings, watercolors and lithographs was mounted at Klutznick Exhibit Hall, Washington, D.C. in December 1974.