Anna Sanderson was born on the North Shore of Auckland in 1970. She has a Bachelor of Arts in photography, and a Bachelor of Arts in English and art history from Auckland University. She has been writing since 1994 when she co-founded Monica, a short-lived but impactful magazine of art criticism. Since then she has authored many parallel texts to elucidate the work of various artists. Since 1998 she has moved from Melbourne to Rotterdam and New York, and now resides in Wellington.
In 2006 VUP published her collection of essays called Brainpark. In November 2007 Anna was named as one of six authors on the shortlist for the 2008 Prize in Modern Letters. The biennial Prize is designed to acknowledge and advance the work of emerging writers in New Zealand.
Anna received a New Generation Award from the Arts Foundation in 2008, and in 2016 she was awarded a PhD in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters for her doctoral project Material and immaterial: The economy in written images.