Born in Des Moines, IA in 1955, Uchiyama studied drawing, painting and American literature at Drake University and the history of pre-Renaissance painting in Florence, Italy. She also attended Yale’s Summer School of Art & Music, Queens College and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. At the Studio School, Uchiyama worked with New York School painter Nicolas Carone, who had studied with legendary teacher and artist Hans Hofmann, whose ideas about pictorial structure, spatial tensions and color relationships greatly influenced postwar American abstraction and subsequent generations of painters.