Ana Maria Sanda Voiculescu was born in Craiova in 1940. When she was five, the family moved to Bucharest, where she would study at the Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture between 1956 and 1962. Her diploma project, which was devoted to the preservation of the historic center of Iasi, earned her a distinction, and Sanda Voiculescu was offered the position of an assistant at the chair for architectural history. Since then, she devoted her work to historic preservation. She later studied at the doctoral program of the Andrea Palladio international center for architectural studies in Vicenza, defending her dissertation, devoted to Romanian architecture of the 13th-16th centuries. Between 1964 and 1968, she worked at the Directorate for Historic Monuments, where she acquired experience in the practice of historic preservation. In 1972, Sanda Voiculescu became a professor at the Ion Mincu Institute. Her scholarship primarily dealt with the history of the architecture of Bucharest.