A native of Cleveland, Oklahoma, Ina Anette studied with George Bridgman and Dimitri Romanovsky at the Art Students League in New York. She later moved to Norman, Oklahoma to teach art at the University of Oklahoma where she met her future husband, Cortez A.M. Ewing, who joined the university faculty in 1928 as a professor of political science.
Known for her modernist-leaning paintings, block prints and lithographs, she also studied with Oscar B. Jacobson and Doel Reed, who taught in the university's art department. They encouraged her to visit New Mexico where they painted and developed friendships with many of the leading artists of the Santa Fe and Taos art communities. Annette herself traveled to Abiquiu, New Mexico where she met and studied with Georgia O'Keeffe. Examples of New Mexico subject matter in her work are a modernist canvas, "Along the Rio Chama" (1937), and a linocut, "Sheep Ranch." In addition to New Mexico, she painted in Arizona in the 1930s reflected in her painting, Black Peaks in Arizona, and in Utah documented by her watercolors of Candy Mountain and Mt. Timpamagos in the Wasatch Range.
While landscapes of Oklahoma and the Southwest comprise a large part of her creative output, she also painted floral still-lifes and portraits, including a striking modernist likeness of Madame X, a Spanish Señorita. Her facility at illustration is seen in her book illustrations for Folk Say (1930) edited by Ben Botkin and Forgotten Frontiers by Alfred B. Thomas.
A member of the Oklahoma Art Association, Annette exhibited at the Oklahoma State Fair, Denver Artists Guild (1931), and the Smoky Hill Art Club in Lindsborg, Kansas, one of whose founders was Birger Sandzén.
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