Sali Ariel was born in Ft. Smith Arkansas, USA and raised on a farm in Oklahoma. She studied Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis,Missouri and Cooper Union in NYC. She married and immigrated to Israel in 1971 where she continued to paint and exhibit her work. Her worked moved from abstract to figurative when she lived for 3 years at a dog and horse farm in the hills of Jerusalem with no electricity. She later divorced and then married the noted cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen and moved back to Jerusalem and later to Tel Aviv where she started to paint her best known works of the Tel Aviv scene and cityscapes and the Bauhaus of Tel Aviv.

She has had numerous international exhibitions including in NYC, Cleveland, Boston, Singapore, Frankfort, the Venice Bienniale Markers IV, and Documenta in Kassel, in Israel Ariel has shown at the Meyerhoff Center of the Tel Aviv Museum, Horace Richter Gallery in Jaffa, Artist's House in Tel Aviv, Florentine Studio Gallery in Tel Aviv, Bet Berl in Kfar Sava, Women to Women in Herzliya, Gallery of the Herzliya Municipality, The Residence of the US Embassy in Herzliya and the CLO office of the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, plus many exhibits at the Bauhaus Center Gallery in Tel Aviv.

Her work is in many private collections all over the world, including the USA, Israel, Switzerland, The UK, Canada, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, Germany, and more.

She is a member of the Israeli Association of Painters and Sculptors, and the International Women's Club of Israel, and she teaches art classes to the Diplomatic Spouses Israel Club, and gives private art lessons.