In 1927, she was awarded a diploma in Design with honors and went on to studies at schools in the U.S. and France. She received her bachelor’s degree from Howard University in 1945, graduating magna cum laude, and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Suffolk University in Boston. She has also received honorary degrees from Colorado State Christian University, Massachusetts College of Art, and Howard University and was elected Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts in London.

Jones began a teaching career at the Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina. She was asked to join the faculty at Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1930, where she became one of the founders of the art department and remained as professor of design and watercolor painting until her retirement in 1977.

In 1937, Jones received a General Education Board Foreign Fellowship to study in France. She studied painting in Paris at the Academie Julian, lived among the French, and learned to speak French fluently. From her very first trip to France, she felt a spiritual affinity for the French people and their nation, explaining that France provided her with the first feeling of absolute freedom. In 1952, a book of more than one hundred reproductions of her French paintings, Loïs Mailou Jones Peintures 1937-1951, was published in Paris. Jones was the only African-American female painter of the 1930s and 1940s to achieve fame abroad.

Loïs Mailou Jones discovered a second spiritual home when, at the invitation of the Haitian government, she traveled to Haiti and its capital city, Port-au-Prince, in 1954. She conducted classes at the Centre d'Art and the Foyer des Artes Plastiques. In recognition, the government of Haiti made her a chevalier of the National Order of Honor and Merit.

Prior to her trip there, Haiti had already acquired a personal meaning for Jones. For nearly twenty years before her eventual marriage to him, Loïs Mailou Jones corresponded with Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel, a prominent Haitian artist whom she met in New York in 1934. After their marriage, they lived together in Washington, DC, Martha's Vineyard, and in Pierre-Noel's hometown of Port-au-Prince. They were married for twenty-nine years, until Pierre-Noel’s death in 1982.

Loïs Mailou Jones is an extremely versatile painter, integrating a wide-ranging visual vocabulary that reflects her passions for French culture, Haiti, and African art. She was one of the first female African-American painters to depict African imagery in her work. While in Paris during her fellowship period she completed a number of paintings with African themes, including Les Fetiches, which she considers her first major painting in this vein. But, her work also reflects a fluent ability to paint across styles – a number of her paintings from France reflect a remarkable understanding of the work of Cezanne and Utrillo.

In 1980, Loïs Mailou Jones was honored by President Jimmy Carter at the White House for outstanding achievements in the arts. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, National Portrait Gallery, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the National Palace in Haiti, and the National Museum of Afro-American Artists. Dr. Jones died in 1998 in Washington, DC, at the age of ninety-three.