The eldest of four children, Toni Risson graduated from the Queensland College of Art and then Kelvin Grove Teachers College, spending the next ten years teaching Art and English to Queensland secondary school students. After marriage and raising a family, she continued to be involved with her art, specialising in paintings of women, but she has also worked with other art forms including mosiac and papier mache.
Risson was a foundation year student in a degree in Contemporary Studies at the Ipswich campus of the University of Queensland. She subsequently undertook PhD studies on the history of confectionery in Australia.
In June 2019, she published A Million Malted Milks: Brisbane's Greek Cafes, which has been partly researched when she was the 2016 Business Leaders Hall of Fame Fellow at the John Oxley Library (2016) and originally published as a blog. It was a finalist for the 2019 People's Choice Queensland Book of the Year at the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards.
