Wanda Corn is a scholar of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art and photography. Having earned a BA (1963), MA (1965) and Ph.D. (1974) from New York University, Professor Corn taught at Washington Square College, the University of California, Berkeley, and Mills College before moving to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California in 1980. At Stanford she held the university's first permanent appointment in the history of American art and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History and Acting Director of the Stanford Museum. From 1992 to 1995 she was the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2000, she became the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History. She retired from teaching at Stanford in 2008. In 2009, she was the John Rewald Distinguished Visiting Lecturer, at the CUNY Graduate Center. Active as a curator of museum exhibitions, she has produced various books and exhibitions, including The Color of Mood: American Tonalism 1880-1910; The Art of Andrew Wyeth; and Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision.

Corn wrote extensively about O'Keeffe's skull paintings in her 1999 book The Great American Thing, Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-35.