Born in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, Huntley grew up in New York City where she took Saturday class at the Art Students League during high school. In 1918, she received a scholarship to attend the New York School of Fine and Applied art, enrolling the following year in regular classes at the League where she worked with realist painters George Bridgman, George Luks and John Sloan, and abstract artist Max Weber.

After her father's death during her second year at the League she entered Columbia University Teachers College, becoming an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the College of Industrial Arts in Denton, Texas (1921-1923). She returned to New York to study with Kenneth Hayes Miller and mural painter, William C. Palmer. In 1925 she married Dr. Ralph Huntley, a professor of physics whose teaching career took them to Connecticut, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey which are reflected in her prints and paintings.

While she did murals for post offices in Springville, New York and Greenwich, Connecticut, under federally-sponsored art programs during the Great Depression, she is best known as a print-maker. At her first one-person show at the Weyhe Gallery in New York in 1930 its director and printmaking connoisseur, Carl Zigrosser, encouraged her to take up lithography. He remained her life-long friend and mentor. She also received advice and instruction from George C. Miller, who helped increase the accessibility of lithography as a medium in the United States.

She initially explored industrial forms in her work, followed by still life, landscape, rural genre scenes and also focused on birds and flowers. Her series, "Steam and Steel," depicting industrial and factory sites earned her national attention. In the 1940s she created a series of lithographs based on the plants and birds of the Florida Everglades. Eight years later she wrote and illustrated, Portraits of Plants and Places.

In the 1930 International Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago she won the prestigious Logan Prize, followed by a first prize at the National Exhibition of the Philadelphia Print Club in 1933. Other awards followed from the Society of American Graphic Artists.

She was a member of the American Artists Group and in 1942 elected an Associate Member of the National Academy in New York City. The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letter awarded her a grant in 1947, followed a year later by a Guggenheim Fellowship. In May 1960 American Art featured her in an article, "On Making a Lithograph," detailing her process in the medium.

Her prints are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Library of Congress, Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art.