Coosje van Bruggen was born in 1942 in Groningen, the Netherlands. Trained as a ballet dancer in her youth, she received a master’s degree in art history with a minor in French literature from the University of Groningen. After having been an assistant curator in the Painting and Sculpture Department at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from 1967–71, she became an independent curator, moving to the United States in 1978 after her marriage to Claes Oldenburg in 1977. In 1982 she served as a member of the selection committee for Documenta 7 in Kassel. Van Bruggen has been Senior Critic in the Department of Sculpture at the Yale University School of Art and taught a design class in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Van Bruggen is the author of articles, books, and catalogues on the artists Gerhard Richter, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, and Hanne Darboven, and the architect Frank O. Gehry, among others. She has written several publications on Oldenburg's early works. In 1985, she created the characters for Il Corso del Coltello (The Course of the Knife), a legendary outdoor performance in Venice, Italy, done in collaboration with Oldenburg and Gehry. Coosje van Bruggen became a citizen of the United States in 1993.