Born in 1929, Ida Applebroog received her formal artistic training from the New York Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences (1948-50), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1965-68), in 1997, she received an honorary doctorate from Parsons School of Design.

Applebroog has been making pointed social commentary in the form of beguiling comic-like images for nearly half a century. She has developed an instantly recognizable style of simplified human forms with bold outlines. In her most characteristic work, she combines popular imagery from everyday urban and domestic scenes, sometimes paired with curt texts, to skew otherwise banal images into anxious scenarios infused with a sense of irony and black humor. Strong themes in her work include gender and sexual identity, power struggles both political and personal, and the pernicious role of mass media in desensitizing the public to violence.

Applebroog has received many awards, including the Jordan Schnitzer award for Excellence in Printmaking, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association. Her work has been shown in many one-person exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, among others.

Ida Applebroog is represented by Hauser & Wirth Gallery.