Leona Barbara Ambrose was born in 1936 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and grew up in Connecticut, Texas, and New York. After attending a teachers college in Oneonta, New York, she studied sculpture, mosaics, and printmaking at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1959 to 1961. She married in 1961 and moved to San Luis Obispo, California. The marriage ended several years later, after which she came to Oregon for the first time and studied at Portland State University. Later in the 1960s, she studied in Los Angeles, California, and in Ravenna, Italy, before doing an apprenticeship at the Joosten Foundry in Soest, the Netherlands, from 1970 to 1971. In 1971, she returned to Oregon, and received a grant to be artist in residence at Woodrow Wilson High School in Portland. She later taught metal sculpting to schoolchildren in the mid- and late 1970s.

Throughout her life, Ambrose took a number of jobs to support herself financially, including positions in teaching, housekeeping, and banking. In the 1990s, she went to Marylhurst College in Marylhurst, Oregon, where she earned a master's degree in art therapy in 1998.

Ambrose's sculptures were exhibited at the Contemporary Crafts Gallery and the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon, in 1975; at the Pindar Gallery in New York in 1987; at the Butters Gallery in Portland in 1990; and at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, in 1992. In addition to sculptures, she also made mosaics and paintings. For most her life in Oregon, she lived in Lake Oswego. She died in March 2021.

Sources: Collection materials; articles in the Oregon Journal and Oregonian, 1971-1977; information provided by RaeAnn Auel Haynes in 2023.