Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on December 6, 1925, Ann Roy attended Mills College in Oakland, California, where she published her first book, Absolutely Normal, to critical acclaim. The following year, recently married, she traveled with her husband Robert Emmitt, to the Four Corners, White Rock, Utah and the Western slope of Colorado where she recorded important ethnographic conversations with Harriet Tavapaunt, a Northern Ute woman, whose accounts would be included in Emmitt’s book, The Last War Trail. Ann was not credited for her fieldwork in the book. Robert and Ann divorced and soon after she met her second husband, artist John Nevin.

Ann and John spent a year traveling in Italy, Spain, Baleares, France and England, where Ann wrote and they studied painting, drawing and photography. Upon their return, Ann created Return from Rome: A Magic Lantern Show, which she later turned into a slideshow accompanied by recorded bilingual narration with her son Willie. 

Ann and John moved to and lived for a brief time in an artist community of Jerome, Arizona, where they had their first son Ian. Soon after, they moved to Guanajuato, Mexico. There Ann worked with local indigenous women, designing and sewing women's and children's clothing. Her designs utilized fabric from the textile mills in nearby San Miguel de Allende and incorporated traditional folklore designs and embroidery. The Marfil Clothing Cooperative produced a line of clothing which Ann sold through her various personal contacts in the United States. While in Guanajuato, Ann assisted in the delivery of 27 babies and gave birth to her second son, Willie.

After the breakup of her second marriage, Ann moved to Tepoztlan, Morelos, a center for international spiritual seekers. There she worked with the astrologer John Starr Cooke and feminist Margaret Fiedler. In Tepoztlán, she produced Super-8 portrait films featuring various people in her community. She also worked with local artist Rita de Tepoztlán in series of photographs of Christa, the female Christ.

Ann began teaching at the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC), founded by the Austrian Roman Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic Ivan Illich, in Cuernavaca. CIDOC was a think tank and free university that attracted intellectuals from North and Latin America, Europe, Catholics and non-Catholics, from the left and the right.

There Ann taught symbol systems (I Ching, Astrology, Tarot) as well as feminist cosmology, and established La Luna Collectiva along with writer, editor and translator Jacqueline Mosio. While at CIDOC, Ann developed the term "patriarchosis," the internalized effect of 4,000 years of patriarchy on an individual and a society. Much of her writing and artwork produced during this time, reflected this idea.

Roy moved from Tepoztlán to Pátzcuar in the state of Michoacán. There she engaged more deeply in political work centered on the Latin American anti-imperialist movement and the liberation theology that formed its ethical base. She met the Mexican journalist Cesar Arias de la Canal and, moved by his book chronicling the grassroots efforts of the Sandinista uprising against the ruling Somoza family, she offered to translate his book The Drums of Monimbo, to English.

Her final move was to San Miguel de Allende to participate in the community of expats, snowbirds, artists and writers and to join an Alcoholics Anonymous group of her peers. In San Miguel she became involved with the Zapatista movement in Chiapas. Under the nom de plume Fair Witness, she translated Zapatista documents, particularly the writings of Subcommandante Marcos, and attended conferences in the jungle and in several Mexican cities. 

It was also in San Miguel de Allende that she took up poetry again, publishing in anthologies and reading publicly in groups like the Live Poets of San Miguel de Allende. She worked closely with Mexican poet Fernando Maqueo, each translating the other's work.

Ann’s younger son Willie, married and had a daughter, Natalia. Both her sons Willie and Ian died unexpectedly, within weeks of each other. Ann was inconsolable. She suffered from myasthenia gravis for several years after their deaths and passed away on May 24, 2006 at age 80. 

— written by Jamie Wagner and Emilie Upczak