Anne Yeats was born on February 26, 1919, in Dublin, Ireland, the daughter of poet W.B. (William Butler) Yeats and Georgie (Hyde-Lees) Yeats. She lived her first few years between Ballylee, County Galway, and Oxford before her family moved to Dublin in 1922. In 1923, her aunt Elizabeth Corbet Yeats gave her drawing lessons, and in 1925 and 1926, Anne won first prize in the Royal Dublin Society National Art competition for children. She attended Pension Henriette, a boarding school in Villars-sur-Bex, Switzerland, from 1928 to 1930.
Yeats trained in the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1933 to 1936 while working as a stage designer with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. She was hired by the Abbey Theatre in 1936 as an assistant to theater designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch. At the Abbey, Yeats designed the sets and costumes for numerous W.B. Yeats plays, such as Purgatory (1938). In 1939, she was promoted to head of design, a role she held until her departure in 1941. Yeats also designed and stage-managed for The Cork Opera House, The Gaiety Theatre, The Olympia, The Peacock, and Player's Theatre.
Yeats began painting full time in 1941, after returning to studying art at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. She painted with oil and watercolor, experimented with lithography and etching, and worked with an expressionist style with a focus on domestic scenes. Yeats also designed many of the covers for the books of Irish-language publisher, Sáirséal agus Dill, and she revived the Cuala Press in 1969 with her brother Michael Yeats after their mother's death. Yeats died at the age of 82 in Dublin on July 4, 2001.
