Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1951, Cheryl Goldsleger matriculated at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) in 1969. She attended Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Rome in 1971 and earned her bachelor of fine arts degree from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1973. She earned a master of fine arts degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1975. She has taught at Western Carolina University (1975–1977), Georgia Piedmont College (1988–2001), and Georgia State University (2001–2014), where she served as the director of the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design. In 2015 she was named the fifth William S. Morris Eminent Scholar in Art at Augusta University.

Her work has been exhibited widely in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad, including notable exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. In 2013 she created a series of acclaimed paintings, drawings, and sculpture and a series of videos for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

As Felicia Feaster noted recently in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “There is an ethereal quality to the works, and an undeniable quality the artist describes of getting lost in the work, falling into these vast metaphysical spaces.”