Sarah Benson grew up in Berkeley, California, and received a BA from Connecticut College in 1993. She is based in Austin, Texas.

She painted throughout the 1990s and worked in the film industry before completing a Masters degree from UT Austin in 2004 in Historic Preservation. She returned to painting and sculpture at the beginning of the pandemic.

Neither figurative nor strictly abstract, her paintings convey emotional presence and suggest ambiguous physical realities. Her sculpture work is concerned with the immediate experience of volume and materiality; the works invite relationship and movement.