Teresa Robinett spent her childhood in a suburb of Boston and her teen years in a small town on the Suwannee River in Florida. In 1991, she traveled West on a Greyhound bus to house-sit for her older sister and fell in love with Oregon. She attended Portland State University, studying fine arts and painting under modern artist Mel Katz. By 1996 she was a founding member of the Hawthorne Arts Guild and Gallery in Portland and a partner with Portland’s Broderick Gallery. She served as the art director of the all-female Fire Festival in 1997 and showed her paintings at alternative spaces around Portland. In 2014, she moved to Astoria with her husband, Todd, and was awarded an artist residency with Astoria Visual Arts in 2016 where she also had a solo show in 2019. The Robinetts own and operate the Merry Time Bar & Grill and the Labor Temple in Astoria.