Coulter Fussell was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia, an old textile town. She is the youngest family quilter, hailing from multi-generations of seamstresses and quilters. Fussell is an experimental quilter who makes hand-sewn sculpted quilt-works sewn entirely from donated clothes and textiles given to her by people in her rural Mississippi town. Fussell sews sculptural objects that graft personal narratives to collective narratives uncovered in the archeological practice of regenerating old clothes as material.

Fussell is a 2024 Award of Merit recipient from The Mississippi Historical Society, a 2023 Mississippi Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship recipient, the 2023 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Visual Arts Inductee, a 2021 Museum of Arts and Design Burke Prize Finalist, the Jane Crater Hiatt Fellow of the 2021 Mississippi Museum of Art Biennial, a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Craft, the 2019 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Visual Arts Inductee, and the Finalist for the 2017 SouthArts Southern Prize. She has works in the permanent collections at The Mississippi Museum of Art and The Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Georgia.

Coulter lives in rural north Mississippi with her family.