Sheila Mae Pinkel was born in Newport News, Virginia in 1941 and raised in Cleveland and Los Angeles. Her father was a scientist who worked on confidential nuclear projects, something she only later learned of in the course of her research and artmaking on the subject; her grandfather was a ILGWU labor organizer, a fact also relevant to her work. In 1959, she enrolled at University of California Berkeley, attracted to its reputation for liberalism and political activism, and while there, participated in demonstrations over the Bay of Pigs invasion and HUAC while mainly studying sculpture.