Sarah Schumann was born in Berlin in 1933. Her parents were sculptors and fostered their daughter's talent from the time she was a child. At nineteen Schumann chose to concentrate on painting. At the same time she began to work through her childhood experiences as a war refugee in the 'Schock-Collagen' ['Schock Collages'], which she showed at her first solo exhibition at 'Zimmergalerie Franck' in Frankfurt. From 1960 to 1963 Sarah Schumann lived in London, where she did her first Informel pictures, material collages, illustrations (Alice in Wonderland) and her first 'Monroe-Darstellungen' ['Representations of Monroe']. Sarah Schumann then moved to the Piedmont in Italy, where she devoted herself to illustrating Rafael Alberti's 'Angelic Poems' and designed and illustrated books for Italian publishing houses. In 1968 Schumann returned to Berlin, where she joined the women's group 'Brot and Rosen' ['Bread and Roses'] and participated in the exhibition of women artists' work entitled 'Künstlerinnen - international - 1877-1977'. At that time Sarah Schumann also began to paint her first large portraits of women. In the 1980s Sarah Schumann travelled to India, Africa and the GDR. She worked up her impressions in large-scale landscapes which are so forbiddingly empty that they seem like uninhabitable non-places. After going to Moscow in 1992, Sarah Schumann returned to human and animal motifs, especially dogs and bears. In 1997 she painted the 'Tiere an fremden Orten' ['Animals in Strange Places'] cycle. Graves and cemeteries also figure prominently in Sarah Schumann's work. Since 1989 Schumann has also done the jacket illustrations to the S. Fischer Verlag complete edition of Virginia Woolf in German translation. Schumann has concentrated primarily on portraits and madonnas since 1994, which have been exhibited at numerous solo and group shows ('Ikone. Porträt. Madonnenbildnisse' at Mariensee convent, Neustadt am Rübenberge). Sarah Schumann now lives and works in Berlin Charlottenburg.