A native of Siberia, Mikhail Mikhailovich Cheremnykh relocated to Moscow in 1911 to study with Il’ia Mashkov, a painter in the avant-garde Jack of Diamonds group. From 1911 to 1917 he studied with Konstantin Korovin and Sergei Malutin at MUZhViZ. In 1919 he established the ROSTA studio in Moscow, for which he served as artistic director until 1922, when he cofounded the satirical magazine Krokodil, with which he would remain associated until his death.

He was active as a book illustrator and from 1939 to 1941 worked as the set designer for both the Leningrad Academic Maly Opera Theater (Malegot) and the State Theater of Opera and Ballet of the Belorusian Soviet Socialist Republic in Minsk. When war broke out in 1941, he helped organize the TASS studio in Moscow, designing its first poster in June of that year and contributing over forty more compositions over the course of its existence. In 1942 he was awarded the Stalin Prize. In 1952 he received the honorific title People’s Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.