Born in New Jersey, Foster spent much of her childhood and adult life in Manhattan, attending the Wadleigh School for the Performing and Visual Arts, followed by Cooper Union. She worked in fashion in New York, wrote poetry, and painted. In the 1970s she retired to Port Jervis, NY to live with her sister, during which time she made ballpoint pen drawings on scraps of paper from magazines and newspapers, and kept them meticulously in photo albums, filling over a dozen.