Audrey (Audrone) Skuodas was born in Kaunas, Lithuania. Like so many of her compatriots who fled from the advancing Soviet armies, at the end of World War II she ended up in a camp for displaced persons in Germany and did not arrive in the United States until 1949 where her family settled in DeKalb, Illinois. After completing her public school education there, she entered Northern Illinois University in 1958 and received her B.A. in 1962 and her M.A. in 1964. One year later she married John Pearson, an artist who already at that time had exhibited his work in England and Germany. After two years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, two in Halifax, Nova Scotia where she taught drawing at the Nova Scotia College of Art, and another two years in Cleveland, Ohio, Audrey Skuodas came to Oberlin, Ohio where her husband John Pearson was a professor of art and chairman of the Art Department.