Originally from Newfoundland, Ann was mentored at an early age by artists Don Wright and Heidi Oberheide. She went on to receive her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, followed by graduate degrees from Queen's University and the University of British Columbia. Ann Manuel has lived and worked as a visual artist and art educator across Canada and around the world.

Ann began exhibiting her work in 1973 and has had solo and group exhibitions across Canada, as well as in Scotland, France and Thailand. She has worked in printmaking studios such as the Edinburgh Print Makers Society, Scotland, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok (where she was an award winner in the Bangkok Printmaking Show), Malaspina Printmaking Studio in Vancouver, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Sunbury Shores in St Andrews, N.B.

Ann brings the diversity of painting, drawing and printmaking mediums and her artistic vision to the widest possible range of art making – from the raw mark making using pastels, oil on canvas and ink on mylar applied with roller to room length paintings on tarpaulin, paper notes folded into installations and the abandoned material of a French vineyard woven into monumental sculpture. Ann has received awards and competitive grants for photography, painting and printmaking. Ann is a thoroughly intellectual artist but she continues to enjoy the sensory calm of still-life painting - both as artistic warm-up and as a refocusing of the mind and artistic eye. She has been the subject of numerous newspaper articles and reviews and her work is represented in public and private collections around the world.

In the last decade, Ann has given much attention to the turmoil within identity as cast in the world of girls and mothers. In oil paintings, drawings and prints, she uses floating figures as a metaphor for the mother and juxtaposes them with groups of young girls strung between moments of tension and calm. During a residency in France, Ann completed installations related to older themes of motherhood and agriculture, encompassing the ideas of sacrifice, nurturing and the continuance of knowledge. The first of these, the Worry Ladder, was woven using elements discarded by others. This installation was the product of reflection on the current state of human relationships to the planet which must be part of the lessons we choose to pass to our children.

Since 2002, Ann has completed four creative residencies, two of which were six months in duration in southern France. Most recently she has attended Prairie North residencies in Alberta (guest facilitators Rita McKeough, David Hoffos, Harold Klunder, and Laura Vickerson), where she began a body of work along the themes of Map Making and Physical Geographies. The Mapping Weather series featured on Ann's printmaking page, is the culmination of this series of work. It commenced with documenting outlying geographies, then moved to closer landscapes and sketching of the physical area most prevalent in the artist's life and has now come ever closer to the artist physical being.