Gisela Gresser was a highly intelligent, highly accomplished and highly successful women for whom chess was just one of her many interests. Even in the early years of organized women's chess, few of the best players were native-born Americans. Mrs. Gresser was born in Detroit in 1906. While attending Radcliffe College where she majored in classical languages, she won a fellowship to research in Athens. Back in New York, she met and married William Gresser, an attorney and musicologist. She had just turned 21.

She was introduced to chess while on a cruise in 1938 when she was 32, and played in her first U. S. Women's Championship just 2 years later, winning it just 4 years after that. (she would win that title again in 1948 (with May Karff), 1954, 1955 (with Nancy Roos), 1957 (with Sonja Graf), 1962, 1965, 1966 (with Lisa Lane), 1967, and 1969 (at age 63).  In 1954 she also won the U.S. Women’s Chess Open.

Gisela Gresser lived to be 94.