Virginia Ione Marshall was born in New York City, the daughter of Arthur Albert Marshall and Agnes Ione Watters Marshall. Her father ran a restaurant; her mother had been an actressShe earned a bachelor's degree in art history at New York University in 1949, with a senior thesis on Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. She met modern art promoter Walter Pach while she was a college student; through him, she met Marcel Duchamp, Edward Hopper, and other contemporary artists in New York. She pursued further art studies in Paris, where she was also the first American to serve as an English-language docent at the Louvre.Zabriskie owned and ran Zabriskie Gallery in New York from 1954 to 2010, and Galerie Zabriskie in Paris from 1977 to 1998. Her shows featured sculptors Elie Nadelman and Mary Frank, and painters Pat Adams, Lester Johnson, Nell Blaine and Miyoko Ito She also mounted historical shows at Zabriskie,including "Surrealism 1936: Objects, Photographs, Collages and Documents" (1986). The Paris gallery emphasized photography in its shows, and included a bookstore. She was first to show a group of abstract ink drawings by sculptor Richard Stankiewicz after they were discovered in the 1980s. She preferred the occupational title "gallerist" to art dealer, saying “My work is less about showing any given client a work of art for sale, but rather presenting an artist’s work."