Anne Humanfeld was born in New York City and was a painting student at Music and Art High School. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art were important sources but her early and continuing exposure to the Museum of Natural History with its manifest timeline of species diversity had the greatest influence on the development of her spiritual and esthetic voice. She studied painting and anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College.
When she and artist Jeff Schlanger were married, they moved into a former railroad station just north of the city where she established her first painting studio. Since that time she has maintained a painting and printmaking studio in New York City. In 1999 she moved her studio uptown to the Mott Haven section of the Bronx where she recently began to develop the transfer series.