Bernette Rudolph was born in the Bronx in 1929, the daughter of a bookkeeper and a seamstress. When she was a young child, her family moved to Far Rockaway, Queens where she lived for the next forty years, marrying, raising two children and working as an artist. In 1974, following the sudden death of her husband, Bernette moved to Brooklyn, maintaining a fully-equipped artist studio in her loft-like apartment. In 2022, Bernette closed her formal studio and moved to Manhattan with much of her art collection.

At an early age, Bernette displayed a talent for art. As a teenager, she attended the Educational Alliance in Manhattan, studying drawing under Abbo Ostrowsky. Later, she studied with Jack Tworkov at his studio, which was next door to De Kooning's studio. She studied sculpture with Seymour Lipton and painting with Max Bechmann at the Brooklyn Museum. Consumed with the desire to become a professional artist, Bernette concentrated on printmaking and studied with Japanese master printmaker Shido Munakata. In 1959, she hosted Munakata at her home on the beach in the Far Rockaways; photos of her with her family and Munakata were published in Life magazine. Bernette developed and followed her own course of study as needed. She received her MFA from Pratt Institute in order to be formally qualified to teach. Her printmaking was done in her own studio as she felt it was superior to the facilities offered at Pratt and elsewhere.

From the very beginning of her printmaking career, Bernette chose wood as her basic material. Early themes for her work included images of a nursing mother, children at play and family life at the ocean.

Once having moved to Brooklyn, Bernette began using electric tools: an electric printing press, a scroll saw and a band saw. Her woodcut prints no longer had a traditional look. Each color in a traditional print is made on a separate block. Now, she used only one block, cutting the wood in a similar fashion to a jigsaw puzzle. Each part came out of the puzzle to be inked and put back in place, reassembled, then as s single, multi-colored composition, printed simultaneously.

Bernette's printmaking practice culminated in her Genesis Series consisting of combined gold and silver compositions celebrating fertility, the embryo, sexual relationship of the vagina and the penis, the seed, gestation, the birth process. Her other print compositions of this time period relied on strong primary colors but similarly featured her fluid, sensual, sexual abstract imagery, uniquely identifiable as her own style and process. While refusing to label herself within any category, Bernette Rudolph's art celebrates those attributes of being a woman, if not a goddess, a Mother Earth symbol or simply a female creative, literally and spiritually. Indeed, Bernette prints, relevant in the 1960s and 1970s as expressions of sexual being and empowerment, speak equally to our contemporary society.

By the early 1980s, Bernette shifted her focus to creating 3D wood sculptural pieces, having spent over twenty years as a printmaker.

For a synopsis of her more recent practice, watch her video from 2017:
Bernette Rudolph: Artist, video by Meredith Zinner Films: