Bettina Steinke, the internationally celebrated portrait painter, was born in New York in 1913. Bettina was brought up in New York City where she began winning prizes for her portraits in high school. She studied at the Fawcett Art Institute in Newark, New Jersey, and later at Cooper Union and the Phoenix Art Institute in New York. Her first big job was a series of 108 heads for the NBC Symphony Orchestra when she was 23. Following her schooling, Steinke worked as an illustrator before marrying photographer Don Blair, with whom she moved to New Mexico in 1955.

It was in 1947 that Bettina and her husband took a vacation and visited Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Upon driving over Palo Flechado pass above Taos, Bettina fell in love with New Mexico and said, "I felt that I had been born here." They settled in Taos for 15 years and later, in 1970, moved to Santa Fe.

Steinke produced portraits of western figures such as John Wayne but her true love was painting the Native Americans she came to know in New Mexico. Bettina's paintings of Eskimos, Indians and their lifestyle has won wide acclaim. Through the years she worked on portrait commissions of a number of famous people, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin D. Roosevelt, General Douglas MacArthur, Ladybird Johnson, and a host of other well known personalities. With her husband, she opened the Blair Galleries in Santa Fe, helping promote the works of New Mexico's most creative artists, including Georgia O'Keeffe.

Bettina's portraits and other works are in many private collections and can be seen in the public collections of the Indianapolis Museum, the Fort Worth Museum, the Koshare Indian Museum, and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage where six of her portraits, including Will rogers and other western personalities, are hung.

Bettina served on the Executive Board of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage; she was a memember of the Society of Illustrators from 1943 to 1963, and was a memember of the National Academy of Western Art, who awarded her medals for her works in 1974 and 1976. Her profile appeared in Who's Who in American Art, Who's Who in the West, Who's Who Honorary Society of America, and in other national and international publications.