Dora Serle (née Hake) was born in South Melbourne on 2 September 1875. She studied at the National Gallery schools and with Phillips Fox, Jane Sutherland, Walter Withers, and Stanhope Forbes at Newlyn, Cornwall, England. In Paris in 1902 she became interested in the Impressionists. For several years before her marriage to Percival Serle she conducted an art school at Geelong. She was, for some seventy years, a member of the Victorian Artists' Society and from 1939 of the Independent Group of Artists; she was president of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters in 1933-34, represented them on the National Council of Women (Victoria), and was a member of the Lyceum Club. Her work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and provincial galleries. She died at Hawthorn on 10 September 1968