A resident of Silver City, New Mexico, Susan Terpning is a painter of Plains Indian figures and their horses. Her parents encouraged her creativity from her childhood in Connecticut. Her father, is highly successful western painter Howard Terpning, whose commitment to art was a major factor in her becoming a professional artist. He later became her teacher.

As a child, she continually drew Indian subjects, but in college at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, she majored in anthropology and then married and moved to Maryland from where she continued her anthropology interests by serving as a guide at the Smithsonian Institution. But she needed income, so her father suggested she turn to painting ...