Lydia Dona was born in Bucharest, Romania in the communist era in 1955 and fled with her parents to Israel in 1961. Her artistic education began in Jerusalem at the Bezalel Academy, an art school strongly influenced by conceptual art, performance art, Arte Povera, and the lexicon of Joseph Beuys.

As a painter, her interest in the European and American legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Abstract Expressionism and abstraction led her to consider continuing her education abroad. She arrived to New York City in 1978, after an investigation of possibly studying at the Dusseldorf Academy, but decided that the late seventies in New York made the School of Visual Arts a more dynamic environment for a young painter. She graduated with ...