She studied drafting at Albuquerque's St. Pius X High School, a parochial Catholic school. In the summer of 1960 Hardin attended the University of Arizona's Southwest Indian Art Project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Also while in high school she was featured in "Seventeen" magazine. In 1961 and 1962 she attended the University of New Mexico, where she studied architecture and art, although her mother wanted her to study business. Her mother also said she didn't like her paintings. Hardin considered her own work to be non-traditional, yet she was influenced by native pictographs, petroglyphs and pottery designs and the works of her teacher Joe Herrera, who was a Cubist from the Cochiti Pueblo.