Dozier Bell was born in Lewiston, Maine, in 1957. She studied painting at Smith College in Northampton, MA, and as a graduate student with Neil Welliver at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture on a full scholarship in 1985. Original influences were the stillness and subdued palette of northern European painters of the Renaissance and Reformation eras, such as Memling, Campin, Holbein, Van der Weyden and Van Eyck.

In 1987, a New York City gallery began representing her imaginary landscapes, inhabited only by dogs, and she won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting. A variety of work in gouache collage, photography, an...