Julie Curtiss was born in 1982 in Paris, France and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts, Paris, during which time she undertook two exchange programmes; one at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Dresden and the other at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Curtiss graduated in 2006 with a BA and MFA.

Employing a highly stylised visual language, she draws on a history of figurative painting including 18th- and 19th-century French painting, as well as the Chicago Imagists and the ‘pop’ imagery of comic books, manga and illustration.