Daphne Mumford studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting in 1952; the Chelsea School of Art, London in 1952-53; and the Brooklyn Museum School of Art in 1953-54.
She was a member of the Tenth Street cooperative, the Area Gallery, where she had two solo exhibitions in 1958 and 1959. In the 1970s she was a founding member of the Landmark Gallery in SoHo, where she was the subject of five solo exhibitions, and participated in several group shows.
Mumford lived in Manhattan before moving with her family to Brooklyn Heights and spending summers in mid-coast Maine. Her earliest work, often portraits of those closest to her, was distinguished by symbolist overtones and subtle, "primitive" drama. By the early 1970s, she turned to a greater degree of naturalism in her depiction of figures, although the environments and interiors were often imagined: a response to either the subjects or intuitive mark-making.
Mumford's work -- with its clear silhouettes, simplified planar areas, patterns of textiles, and the mimimalist geometries of interiors and exteriors -- bears a relationship to contemporaries such as Alex Katz and Will Barnet. Mumford tended to focus her gaze on her family: her two daughters (one of whom was a dancer) and their friends.