Susan left Montreal in 1966 at the age of 17 to study painting at Pratt Institute in New York City. She attended schools in Boston, Maine, Montreal, and finally the New York Studio School of Drawing and Painting in 1972. And invitation to teach painting in Vancouver, British Columbia brought her back to Canada in 1980. She has since taught in various schools throughout North America and currently teaches at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.

In the eight years Scott spent in New York after finishing school she held many odd jobs, including film editing, something which had a profound effect on her perception of narrative structure. As a student in 1970s New York she learned to paint in the "tradition" of abstraction. She found her own voice as an artist when she rejected the tenets of abstraction in her own practice and embarked on a lifelong fascination with the challenging tradition of narrative figure painting, referenceing texts as diverse as the novels of Kafka, Yiddish fold tales and Cocteau's Les enfants terribles. She incorporates direct observation as well as photographs of scenes which she stages using live models and costumes. The process of working back and forth from model to photograph to canvas can continue for many months, creating a layering of reality and narrative interpretation.