Martha Russo earned her undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1985, where she majored in developmental biology and psychology.  Formerly a world-class athlete, she suffered a career-ending knee injury in 1984 while preparing for the Olympic games.  After her recovery from surgery, she was attracted to the physical nature of sculpture and how it used physical space.  During a semester away from Princeton, Russo studied art history in Florence.  When she returned to Princeton, she studied with ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu.  In 1995, she earned her MFA at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she studied with Betty Woodman and Scott Chamberlin.  Since 1996, Russo has been a professor of sculpture at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Colorado.

Martha actively exhibits her work nationally and internationally, including venues in New York, California, New Mexico, China, Mexico, Europe, South America, and the Middle East.  She has received numerous grants and awards, including a Colorado Council for the Arts Artist Fellowship Grant.  Russo challenges herself to express in clay the kind of feelings that simultaneously invite and resist description in language.  These sculptures suggest the intersection between thought and feeling, an often wordless state felt powerfully in the body.  Russo says the sculptures allow viewers to "linger in a sensuous state."  They capture a viewer's curiosity and "lure them close" while experiencing what Russo calls a "temporary suspension of adult language."