Edna Hibel was born in 1917 in Boston, Mass.  She started painting at the age of 9 when, according to her son, the teacher gave her paper and colors to distract her from math as she was better than the other children and it frustrated them.
She spent many summers in the shore in Massachusetts and Maine studying watercolor painting and eventually graduating from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts in 1939.   In 1942 she received the Sturtevant Traveling Fellowship to study in Mexico.