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Betty LaDuke was born Betty Bernstein in 1933 in the Bronx, New York. She enrolled in the High School of Music and Art in New York when she was sixteen and attended a summer camp where she took art classes taught by well-known African-American artists Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White. As a college student, she continued her education through scholarships to Denver University, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, Mexico. She lived in Mexico from 1953 to 1956, and it was there that she was first introduced to indigenous cultures and also met Mexican modernists Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. It was this early exposure to a diverse array of experiences, cultures, and artists that set LaDuke on a path she still follows today.

In 1963 LaDuke completed her academic schooling at California State University in Los Angeles with a special secondary art teaching credential and a master's degree in printmaking. She immediately started teaching junior high school art in East Los Angeles, but in 1964 took a teaching position at Southern Oregon University (SOU) in Ashland. She was the only woman in the Art Department for eighteen years of her thirty-two-year career there. Her teaching and art demonstrated her desire to raise the profile of women and international artists. As part of her efforts she initiated "Women and Art" and "Art in the Third World" courses at SOU, and her exhibitions highlighted the themes from the courses she taught, including one at Willamette University in 1977 titled Landscape: A Feminine Mythical View. LaDuke has also published a number of books documenting the art and experiences of women in Africa, Asia, and Latin-America.

LaDuke has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and is represented in many public collections, including Willamette University's Hallie Ford Museum of Art. Her process involves developing a series of sketchbooks and taking numerous photographs during her travels which then form the basis for her larger works and exhibitions. Other thematic elements in her work include animals, rituals, and celebrations, which LaDuke uses to illustrate similarities among geographically and traditionally disparate cultures. She received the Oregon Governor's Award in the Arts in 1993 and the National Art Education Association's Ziegfield Award for distinguished international leadership in 1996.

LaDuke has completed several large-scale projects, including multi-panel exhibitions and murals. For a commission from Heifer International, she created an extensive mural sequence called Dreaming Cows (2009) to explore poverty and food-related issues throughout the world. In 2013 the Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport installed twenty-six panels by LaDuke entitled Celebrating Local Farmers and Farmworkers that share her vision of the dignity and hard work of Southern Oregon's farmers and farm workers. In December of 2016, LaDuke saw her artwork documenting the life and struggles of the people of Eritrea from 1994 onward installed permanently in Eritrea at the invitation of the Eritrean government. LaDuke's most recent project includes a walking exhibit of her artwork, classroom visits, and a public presentation at Willamette University during fall 2017, courtesy of a Willamette University Sustainability Institute Green Fund Grant.