Geraldine Carol Pontius was born on January 24, 1947 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania to parents Paul Edward and Doris Norma (nee Hesselmeyer) Pontius. She studied mathematics at Barnard College, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1968. She went on to study at the New York Studio of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture before obtaining a Master of Architecture at Columbia University in 1975.

Pontius has worked as an architect, artist, and lecturer. Early in her career, she collaborated often with performance artist Laurie Anderson, appearing in her 1974 film Dearreader: How To Turn a Book Into a Movie and her multimedia piece United States, I-IV, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983.

As an architect she’s worked in private practice, and as a designer and draftsperson for several large firms, such as I.M. Pei and Partners, RTKL Associates, and Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. While working at RTKL, she was the lead architect for One South Street Office Tower, also known as Commerce Place, a high-rise office building and the fourth tallest skyscraper in Baltimore. Her work has been featured in many exhibitions and publications, including Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, and Art in America.

In 2015 she collaborated with poet Sarah Smith on a submission to The Light Ekphrastic, a journal devoted to nurturing collaboration between artists; the journal published Smith’s poem alongside Pontius’s gallery of images taken at the Oklahoma City National Memorial. She continues to work as a visual artist, and splits her time between Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.