Carla Schaareman grew up in the Netherlands. She received her BA/MA in fine arts from the Willem de Kooning Academy in the Netherlands in 1990, after having studied at several other art institutions, including The Royal Academy in Den Haag and De Vrije Academie in Den Haag. Until 1998, she worked in her own studio on commissions and developing her own work. In the summer of 1998, she and her family moved to California.

Carla completed the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training in 2006. Her teaching experience includes 3 years of printmaking, veil painting, figure drawing and stone carving at East Bay Waldorf High School, and clay modeling at the Novato Charter School. Since February 2009, she has been teaching at the San Francisco Waldorf High School: 9^th/10^th grade drawing, 11^th grade veil painting and 11^th/12^th grade electives in oil painting, cooking, advanced drawing and printmaking. Since 2015, she has been teaching painting and high school arts at BACWTT and wet-in-wet method watercolor painting at Lifeways and Rudolf Steiner College.