Dozier Bell was born in Lewiston, Maine. She graduated magna cum laude from Smith College in 1981 and received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. 

In addition to a Fulbright Fellowship as artist-in-residence at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, Bell has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundations, residencies at both the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, and in 2014, a Purchase Prize award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York.

Her work appears in the permanent collections of the Bates, Colby, and Bowdoin College museums; the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, ME; the Denver Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, among others. 

She lives and works in Waldoboro, ME