Rosemary Mayer was born and raised in Ridgewood, New York and lived in New York City for most of her life. She studied classics at St. Joseph's College and the University of Iowa and fine art at the School of Visual Arts and the Brooklyn Museum Art School. A prolific artist and writer who explored many media, she was most well-known for her sculptures and installations in the 1970s and 1980s and her involvement in the feminist art movement. Her translation of the diary of the Italian Mannerist artist Pontormo, which included a catalogue of her own work, was published in 1979. Recent projects involved illustrating Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the history of the women of the Roman Empire.

She received grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Council on the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She had solo exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery, the Monique Knowlton Gallery, the Pam Adler Gallery, and others. She was a dedicated and inspired professor of art at LaGuardia Community College, where she taught for twenty years, and of writing at Long Island University (Brooklyn).