Barbara Chase-Riboud was born in 1939 in Philadelphia. She lives and works in Paris.

A sculptor, poet and novelist, Barbara Chase-Riboud began her training as an artist aged seven at the Fletcher Academy in Philadelphia; she was just sixteen when the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York acquired one of her first works. She studied at Temple University and at Yale, where she became the first African American woman to graduate from the university’s architecture school. Whilst living in Rome between 1957 and 1959, she created her first sculptures in bronze, and her work was featured in solo exhibitions for the first time.

During her stay in Rome, she also visited Paris as well as Greece, Egypt and Turkey, where she discovered extra-occidental art. In 1961, she settled in Paris and married French photographer Marc Riboud. Her work has since been widely exhibited in numerous institutions in the United States, France and elsewhere in the world, including in Japan, Australia, and Germany. She has also come to be celebrated as an author since she published her first book of poetry, From Memphis & Peking, to critical acclaim in 1974. This was followed in 1979 by her first novel, The Virginian (Sally Hemings). Her novels have won numerous awards, including the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. In total, she has a dozen novels and collections of poetry to her name.

In recent years, she has been awarded a number of prizes and distinctions for her work as an artist, including the Anonymous Was a Woman Prize in 2020 in New York, as well as the AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions) Prix d’Honneur and the Simone et Cino Del Duca Foundation Grand Prix at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2021 in France.

The main institutions featuring works by Barbara Chase-Riboud in their permanent collections are the Berkeley Art Museum (California); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Newark Museum (New Jersey); the New Orleans Museum of Art (Louisiana); the New York Historical Society Museum (New York); the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Pennsylvania); the Smithsonian African American Museum (Washington D.C.); the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); and the Centre National Des Arts Plastiques (France).