Francesca Sundsten was born in southern California, but moved to the Seattle area at the age of three. She has also lived for a year or morein England, Malaysia, Boston, and San Francisco. She began painting earnestly in her early 20's and enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute at the age of 24.

It was the mid 1980's when 'ugly art' duelled with conceptualism. Neither discipline seemed to provide a meaningful or pertinent direction for her. After a poverty stricken three months on the European continent and visits to over a hundred museums there, she ascertained that the most engaging and necessary pursuit was to follow her love of representational painting, which was very disapproved of in her undergraduate program. Returning to San Francisco, she spent the next two years defending this very unpopular direction. A show of Odd Nerdrum's work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1985 indicated that she wasn't entirely alone, and she promptly headed to Oslo the following summer for an informal apprenticeship with him there. She was eventually awarded her diploma. Two years of graduate school at Stanford University allowed her to continue her exploration of representational painting depicting intangible and inexplicable narratives. She continues this quest living with her husband and cat back in Seattle.