Maria Elena Vieira da Silva was born in Lisbon on June 13, 1908. At age 11, Vieira da Silva begins a painting and drawing apprenticeship at the Art Academy of Lisbon. Before the age of twenty, she studies painting with Fernand Léger and Charles Dufresne, sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle, and engraving with Stanley Hayter. She also creates works in textiles (tapestries) and ceramics (windows).

Vieira da Silva moves to France in 1928, where she marries the Hungarian painter Arpad Szenes in 1930, and is naturalized as a French citizen in 1956. In 1930, she exhibits her paintings in Paris. After a brief stay in Lisbon and a period in Brazil during the Second World War, she lives and works in Paris for the rest of her life. At the end of the 1950s, Vieira da Silva has gained international renown for her dense and complex compositions, influenced by Paul Cézanne, with their fragmented forms, their spatial ambiguities, and their restrained palette of colors with roots in Cubist and abstract art. She is considered one of the most important post-war abstract artists, even though her painting was not entirely abstract. He works often resemble labyrinthine cities or even library shelving; allegories of an eternal quest for knowledge of the absolute.

Vieira da Silva has exhibited her works in numerous places across the world and was honored with an award for her painting at the Sao Paulo biennale in 1961. Vieira da Silva was awarded the Grand Prix National des Arts du gouvernement  français in 1966 (she was the first woman ever so distinguished). She was named  Knight of the Légion d’honneur in 1979.

She died in Paris on March 6, 1992. In November 1994 she was inaugurated into the Arpad Szenes Vieira da Silva Foundation in Lisbon, which exhibits an important collection of the two artists. Vieira da Silva was exhibited as one of the artists reunited within the exposition “L’envolée lyrique, Paris 1946-1956” presented at the Luxembourg Museum from April – August 2006.