Gertrude (Trude) Hanscom (née Gertrude Fandrich), painter, printmaker and teacher, was born on 6 December 1890 in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Her family moved to Waterloo, New York where she grew up. As a young woman she worked for many years as a stenographer in nearby Geneva, but eventually studied art at Syracuse University and Kline's School of Graphic Arts at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Art (now the Everson Museum of Art).

In the late 1920s she met and married Charles G. Hanscom and they moved to Southern California around 1930. They lived in various cities near Los Angeles while Trude continued her art education at the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, Scripps College in Claremont, and the Otis Art Institute. She worked as an art instructor in public schools of Alhambra, Glendale, and San Gabriel, and she also had private students. In the late 1930s her work had gained recognition throughout Southern California and, in 1937, she was given a solo exhibition of her prints of Los Angeles's Chinatown at the Charles W. Bowers Memorial Museum in Santa Ana. The following year she exhibited etchings at the San Gabriel Artists' Guild to critical acclaim. Hanscom was soon exhibiting regularly throughout out California.

Hanscom was a member of and exhibited with the California Art Club, the California Printmakers, the Society of American Graphic Artists, the Glendale Art Association, the Pasadena Society of Artists, and the Women Painters of the West for which she served as the first vice president. Her work was included in the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco and the 1943 exhibition of Women Painters of the West at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for which she was awarded the Julia Ellsworth Ford Prize for oil painting. In 1965, she received an Honorary Life Membership in the Society of American Graphic Artists. Her work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Wichita Art Museum, Kansas.

Her work is featured in Maurine St. Gaudens’ four-volume Emerging from the Shadows: A Survey of Women Artists Working in California, 1860-1960 and was included in the related exhibition, Something Revealed: California Women Artists Emerge, 1860-1960, held at the Pasadena Museum of History.

Trude Hanscom settled in Santa Barbara, California and died there on 7 June 1975.