Wilma Cannon Fairbank was born on April 23, 1909, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the oldest child of Dr. Walter B. Cannon, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, and the author Cornelia James Cannon. She studied fine arts at Radcliffe Collee and was an apprentice to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera before she traveled to Beijing in 1932 to marry John King Fairbank (1907-1991).

While in China, Fairbank visited the remote countryside. There she studied Buddhist cave temples, ancient stone tomb carvings, and bronze vessels, using her research to write scholarly articles on the methods and materials of early Chinese artists. Returning to the United States in 1936, she and her husband settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where John Fairbank was appointed to Harvard University’s department of history. During World War II, the Fairbanks moved to Washington, D.C., where Wilma became the first employee of the China section of the State Department’s cultural relations division, which dealt with scholarly and cultural exchange.

From 1945 to 1947, Fairbank was cultural attaché to the United States Embassy in Chongqing and later Nanjing. She and John had two daughters, Laura (born 1949) and Holly (born 1953).

In 1984 she edited Liang Sicheng's A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture. In 1995 she published Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China’s Architectural Past, a biography of a Chinese couple, Liang Sicheng (1901-1972) and Lin Whei-yin (also known as Phyllis) (1904-1955), who were groundbreaking scholars and good friends. She also authored Adventures in Retrieval in 1972 and America's Cultural Experiment in China in 1976.

John Fairbank died in 1991. Wilma Fairbank died at home on April 4, 2002.