Staller was raised in Glencoe, Illinois, and as a child attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a scholarship.[3] She spent her last year in high school as an exchange student in Mexico.[3] She obtained her BA from Wellesley College, where "art history was [her] eighth declared major".[3][2] She also studied harpsichord with Lola Odiaga and photography with Minor White.[2]
Staller obtained her PhD from Harvard University in 1983; her doctoral dissertation was titled Toward 'the total image': The Thematic Origins of Cubism.[1][4] After visiting positions at the University of Chicago and Princeton University, he joined the Amherst College faculty in 1992.[2][3]
Staller was a contributor to the catalog for the 1997 National Gallery of Art exhibition Picasso: The Early Years 1892-1906.[5] In 2001, she published A Sum of Destructions: Picasso's Cultures and the Creation of Cubism,[3] where she argued that Picasso's earlier career was connected to his Cubism style at a larger extent than previously thought.[6] The book was a finalist for the 2003 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award,[7] and the Society for Iberian Global Art awarded it and Jesús Escobar's The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid the 2004 Eleanor Tufts Book Award.[6] Choice also named the book an Outstanding Academic Title of the Year.[2] In 2005, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.[8] She has also appeared as a featured expert in several documentary works like Annenberg Learner's Art Through Time: A Global View,[9] Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies, and The Private Life of a Masterpiece.[2]
Staller is married to Gary Ruvkun; they have one daughter.[3] She lives in Newton, Massachusetts.[3]