The beginning of her training as an artist started when Sonia Andrade attended the studio of the artist Maria Tereza Vieira, in 1972. At the end of 1973 she started attending Anna Bella Geiger’s classes. The following year, Andrade and Fernando Cocchiarale organized a group composed by the artists: Ana Vitoria Mussi, Anna Bella Geiger, Leticia Parente, Miriam Danowski, Ivens Machado and Paulo Herkenhoff. The group ran weekly meetings until 1976. From 1978, Sonia moved to Rio and Paris, where she studied Chinese calligraphy with Master Ung No Lee. In 1982 she moved to Zurich where she continued her studies of calligraphy with Suishu Tomoko Arii. In 1998 returns definitively to Rio de Janeiro.
Sonia participated in national and international exhibitions, such as: two São Paulo Biennials, 14th (1977) and 32nd (2016); Corps Étrangers, at the Musée du Louvre (2006); Video Art – Institute of Contemporary Art – University of Pennsylvania, USA (1975); Visual Poetics at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (1977), among others. Her works are in collections in Brazil and abroad, such as: Center Pompidou – Paris, The Getty Institute – Los Angeles, Harvard University Library, Sammlung Verbund – Vienna, and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.