Kalman Kubinyi, painter, printmaker, illustrator, enamellist, and educator, was born in Cleveland, Ohio on June 29, 1906. His parents were Hungarian immigrates who arrived In the United States five years earlier. His early art training was at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He also studied at the Council Educational Alliance and graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1927, having studied with Rolf Stoll and Henry George Keller. Kubinyi's uncle, Alexander von Kubinyi, was an artist living in Munich with whom he spent the summers of 1928 and 1929 studying art.

Kubinyi was a modernist and became a prominent artist in Northeast Ohio. He founded the Cleveland Printmakers Club in 1930 and served at its president for eleven years. He established the Print-a-Month Club in 1932, which allowed yearly subscribers to receive a print each month. In 1933, he headed the WPA graphics workshop and was district supervisor of the entire Cleveland WPA Art Project. He taught printmaking at the John Huntington Polytechnic Institute in Cleveland, the Cleveland School of Art, and was an instructor at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan between 1945 and 1950.

In 1941 he built a kiln for enameling and by 1950 he abandoned printmaking to work in enamels. His wife, Doris Hall, was also an enamellist and together they created a mural for Michigan State University. Kubinyi was a member of the Cleveland Artists Union, American Artists Congress, Artists Equity Association, and the National Society of Mural Painters. He was president of the New England Chapter of the Artists Equity Association between 1951 and 1952.

Kubinyi exhibited with the American Artists Congress, the Philadelphia Print Club, the Cleveland Museum's May Show, the Syracuse Ceramic National, and the 1939 New York Worlds Fair. His work is represented in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum, the Gibbes Museum of Art, Michigan State University, and the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco.

Kalman Kubinyi died in Stockbridge, Massachusetts on September 3, 1973.