Lisa Fugard was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, the only child of playwright Athol Fugard and novelist Sheila Meiring Fugard. She moved to New York City in 1980 to pursue an acting career, and has garnered numerous stage and film roles, including Isabel Dyson in the original production of her father's My Children! My Africa! She, her husband, and son, have lived in the desert of Southern California since early 2002, in Borrego Springs and Encinitas, on the coast north of San Diego, not far from where her parents now live. Since 1992, she has written many short stories for literary magazines, and articles for the New York Times travel section. In January 2006, she wrote the novel Skinner's Drift, ISBN 978-0-7432-7299-5, about turmoil on a South African farm in 1997. Fugard was a guest speaker at the 2007 Literary Guild of Orange County Festival of Women Authors.