She began making sculpture at 54, and just two years later Dorothy Dehner had her first one-woman exhibition at New York's Willard Gallery. Throughout the next four decades, Dehner was an award-winning sculptor, producing abstract works in various media.

The Cleveland native had originally intended to be an actress. Following the death of her parents, in 1918 Dehner moved to California, where she took classes at the Pasadena Playhouse and majored in drama at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1922 she resettled in New York City and three years later switched her sights to a career in visual art. For several years Dehner studied painting at the Art Students League, getting to know emerging American modernists, including the sculptor David Smith, whom she married in 1927.

While living in Brooklyn and then, from 1940 to 1950, on a farm at Bolton Landing in upstate New York, Dehner limited her artistic production to drawings and paintings, participating in only a few group shows. Her work at this point was figurative, alternating idyllic representations of her daily life on the farm with devastating, demonic images that reflected the deteriorating state of her marriage. After she and Smith separated in 1950 (they divorced two years later), Dehner was more active professionally, studying printmaking at Stanley Hayter's Atelier 17 and becoming known for her work in three dimensions. Initially Dehner made cast-bronze sculpture; in the mid-1970s she started working with wood, and during the early 1980s she produced enormous pieces in Corten steel. The recipient of numerous art prizes and an honorary doctorate, Dehner had major retrospectives of her work at the Jewish Museum in New York (1965), City University of New York (1991), Katonah Museum of Art (1993), and Cleveland Museum of Art (1995).