Cynthia Bickley-Green studied art at La Brera, Milan, Italy, and in the studio of Italian Futurist painter Pippo Rizzo at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. She holds BA and MA degrees in art from the University of Maryland and an MA from George Washington University in Higher Education and Human Development. In 1990 she finished her PhD in Art at the University of Georgia.

Bickley-Green was part a cadre of Washington, DC, artists active in the late 1960s and '70s. During this time Washington Color School artists Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Howard Mehring, Tom Downing, and Paul Reed exhibited in local galleries. She was a member of the steering committee for the first National Conference for Women in the Visual Arts in 1972 held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Bickley-Green's paintings have been exhibited in over 100 exhibitions and public collections, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; American University; and University of Maryland. Recently her work was displayed at the Elberson Fine Arts Center at Salem College, The Arts Club of Washington, the MGM Grand Resort & Casino at National Harbor in Maryland, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. Her painting Yellow Miss is included the U. S. Art in the Embassies Program and has been shown in many locations in the world, most recently in 2018 Copenhagen, Denmark.

She is presently a professor of art at East Carolina University where she has taught for 27 years. Her research and many publications explore the biology of art and the interaction of visual media and pedagogy and the development of social identities. She is the author of Art Elements: Biological, Global, and Interdisciplinary Foundations, 2011.

In 2018, Bickley-Green's painting Scarab (1967) was featured in the show Full Circle, Hue and Saturation in the Washington Color School at the Luther Brady Art Gallery, Corcoran School of Art and Design, George Washington University. In 2020 her painting Entoptic Shapes-Downstream Animas was included in Front Burner: Highlights in Contemporary North Carolina Painting at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC. Her painting Lamentations (the painting on the cover of the North Carolina Literary Review) is an announcement for the Front Burner exhibition and is reproduced on a billboard in the North Carolina Museum of Art sculpture garden.