Bradford was born in 1942 in New York City and grew up in Connecticut. When she was a child, her mother discouraged the "bohemian" life of the arts, despite Bradford's grandfather, Jacques André Fouilhoux, being a prominent architect. After earning a BA at Bryn Mawr College, Bradford followed a conventional (1960s) path, marrying Peter A. Bradford and raising twins born in 1969; her children are writer and filmmaker Arthur Bradford and Laura Bradford, who is in law. When the family moved to Maine in the early 1970s, she joined an art community there that included Lois Dodd and Yvonne Jacquette, among others. Without training, she began creating abstract work concerned with markmaking, the materiality of paint, and the landscape tradition. She also co-founded the Union of Maine Visual Artists (1975) and wrote art reviews for The Maine Times. In 1979, despite disapproval from her family, Bradford moved to New York City as a single mother to pursue art in closer contact with contemporary painting discourse. She enrolled in graduate studies at SUNY Purchase (MFA, 1987) and met her future spouse, Jane O'Wyatt, in 1990. In the subsequent decade, she had solo exhibitions at the Victoria Munroe (New York), Zolla/Lieberman (Chicago), and Bernard Toale (Boston) galleries, and appeared in group shows at the Portland Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum and The Drawing Center. In the 2000s, Bradford has exhibited at the CANADA, Sperone Westwater and Pace galleries in New York, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Galerie Haverkampf (Berlin), Campoli Presti, Kaufman Repetto (Milan), and the New Orleans Biennial (Prospect.4, 2017), among others.