American artist Edda Renouf was born in Mexico City in 1943. She moved to the United States in 1957, and began her studies at Sarah Lawrence College in 1961. She spent a semester abroad at the Academie Julian in Paris, receiving her B.A. in 1965. In 1967 she studied at the Art Students League in New York City, eventually settling there as she pursued her MFA at Columbia University studying under Richard Pousette-Dart. There, too, she spent a year abroad, now at the Akademie der Bildende Kunste in Munich from 1969 to 1970.

In 1974, Renouf was introduced by Richard Tuttle to the collectors Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, who worked closely with her for much of her early career. Renouf lived and worked in New York City until 1991, when she moved France. Her first solo exhibition was in 1972 at a prestigious gallery in Paris, Yvon Lambert, and she has continued to exhibit throughout Europe.  In 1997 she had a retrospective exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, Germany and more recently, in 2004, The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., gave Renouf a solo exhibition titled ‘Revealed Structures’. Renouf has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

Her work has been exhibited and collected by numerous museums internationally. A small selection of these includes the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the British Museum in London; and the Australian National Gallery in Canberra.