Seta Manoukian was born into a Lebanese-Armenian family and began to draw at an early age, taking private lessons with the well-known Lebanese painter Paul Guiragossian (1926-1993) from 1960-1962. In 1963 she won first prize in an art competition organised by the Italian Embassy and received a three-month scholarship to study art in Perugia, Italy. Afterward, she studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, graduating in 1966.
In 1967 S. Manoukian returned to Beirut and began teaching at a high school, while continuing to paint. In the same year she had her first solo show at Galerie Alecco Saab in Beirut. She became involved with the politically committed, left-wing intellectual and artistic community in Beirut, whose feelings of despair vis-à-vis the political crises of the country and the Arab world she shared. In her work this translated into a series of studies of interior spaces, often with disturbing angles and empty of life, such as The Sewing Machine (1968) and Mirror and Chair (1968), as well as the paintings of the White Period series (c. 1970s).
When the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975, S. Manoukian had just begun teaching in the Fine Arts Department of the Lebanese University. In the following years she was active on many levels, painting, teaching at the university and working with children in impoverished neighbourhoods, while also publishing two books about her work with children. In all these activities, her political commitment was a driving force, which also led her to create several posters to show her solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Her paintings of this period show her deep connection to her city, with street views in vivid colours and an occasional blending of urban elements from different locations that create fragmented pannels within the painting that look as if they were zoomed in with a camera.

As the Civil War dragged on, S. Manoukian grew increasingly anxious and in 1985 she decided to leave. She relocated to Los Angeles, where she continued to work as an artist, joining the Sherry Frumkin Gallery in Santa Monica in the 1990s. She explored the theme of exile in the so-called T-Shapes series, such as Immediately Afterwards (1989), depicting a horizontal person “floating” above a standing one. The ambiguous feelings of the exile and of being displaced were also central to her three-part performance My Father in the Tree (1995).

S. Manoukian’s artistic practice is closely linked to her search for what she has called her “real self”, an expression of her innermost, spiritual world. Although she had previously defined herself as an atheist, S. Manoukian felt drawn to Buddhism and joined a Buddhist temple in Los Angeles in 2000. Feeling the need to concentrate on her spiritual path, she travelled to Asia to study and was ordained as a Buddhist nun in Sri Lanka in 2005, taking the name of Mother Sela. In 2006 she joined Tibetan Buddhism and became Ani Pema Drolma. During this time of profound spiritual study, she temporarily stopped painting, as she felt unable to combine the two intensive practices. In 2016, she resumed her artistic practice.

Her work is held in major collections of the region, such as the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; the National Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan; Saradar Collection, Beirut and the Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon.