Lanier was born in Miami, Florida. She studied at the College of Industrial Arts (now Texas Woman’s University), Denton, the Art Students League of New York, the Sorbonne, and reportedly the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. A resident of Dallas in the 1930’s, she moved during World War II to Washington, D.C., where show worked as a cartographer with the U.S. Army Signal Corps and for the U.S. Air force at the Pentagon after the war. In 1955 she moved to El Paso. She worked as a display artist for the missile program at nearby White Sands, New Mexico, and attended for a time Texas Western College, El Paso. Lanier moved back to Dallas in the late 1960’s, then to East Texas and numerous other places before her death in Austin. She donated her body to a Texas medicine school. Lanier’s illustrations are found in Frank H. Cushin’s rare book My Adventures in Zuni (Santa Fe: Peripatetic Press, 1941); Siddie Joe Johnson’s Texas: The Land the Tejas (New York: Random House, 1943), a children’s history of Texas; Manuel C. DeBaca’s Vicente Silva and His 40 Bandits (Washington, D.C.: McLean, 1947); various other children’s books; ad maps in the official history of the Army Air Corps in World War II. After 1932 Lanier usually signed her works Fanita Lanier, her maiden name. Exhibitions: Annual Allied Arts Exhibition, Dallas (1929-33); Texas Centennial Exposition, Dallas (1936); State National Bank, El Paso (1962); El Paso Public Library (1963). Murals: Hall of State, Fair Park, Dallas; Federal Reserve Bank, Dallas; Hotel de Rancho, Gallup, New Mexico. Collections: U.S. Army White Sands Missile Range (diorama), New Mexico. Source: Texas Painters, Sculptors & Graphic Artists: A Biographical Dictionary of Artists in Texas before 1942; by: John and Deborah Powers Source: John and Deborah Powers, Texas Painters, Sculptors, and Graphic Artists