Claire Watson was born in Amarillo, TX. She earned a BFA in Painting from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980, and an MFA in Sculpture at Tyler School of Art in Rome and Philadelphia in 1984. Her honors include a Fellowship in Sculpture from New York Foundation for the Arts in 2007 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1990. She has been awarded several residencies, including an artist residency at The Watermill Center in 2020; a Residency Fellowship at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts in 2019; and a Studio Residency at MASS MoCA in 2018. Her work is in numerous private and public collections, and has been exhibited at Site: Brooklyn; Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT; Ille Arts, Amagansett, NY; Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, NY; Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY; and Art in General, NYC, among numerous other venues. Since 1996 she has lived and worked in Water Mill, New York, where she raised two sons with her husband, artist Stephen Laub.