Jean Halpert-Ryden, painter, was born Jeanette Muriel Halpert in Brooklyn, New York on 26 December 1919 to Mildred and Abraham Halpert. She studied at Brooklyn College and then studied art under the painter and stage designer Mol Solotaroff in New York City.

Her first exhibition was at the Jimmy Ernst's Norlyst Gallery in Manhattan in 1946. The following year she married artist and designer Edward Ryden and they moved to Colorado. In 1949, the couple relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area where Edward worked on his MFA and Jean studied lithography at the California College of Arts and Crafts. They lived in San Francisco but built a second home on Sonoma Mountain in Sonoma County, California.

An exhibition of Halpert-Ryden's work was mounted in 1959 at the Palace of the Legion of Honor and other solo exhibitions of her work were held at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery and the Rotunda Gallery in the City of Paris in San Francisco; Galerie Mirage, Montpellier, France; ACCI Gallery in Berkeley; Hansen Fuller Gallery in San Francisco; Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art; Western Galilee College, Israel; and the Unitarian Universalist Church in San Francisco.

She was a member of and exhibited with the San Francisco Art Association, San Francisco Women Artists, and the California Watercolor Society. Collections holding the work of Jean Halpert-Ryden include the San Francisco Art Commission, IBM Corporation, Kaiser Corporation, Clorox Corporation, and A Mickiewicz Museum in Warsaw.

Jean and Edward moved to Israel in 1985 where she continued to paint and to exhibit her work. The couple returned to California in August of 2002 after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Jean Halpert-Ryden died in Santa Rosa, California on 14 March 2011.