Joseph Margulies, painter, printmaker, teacher, and lecturer, was born in 1896 in Vienna, Austria. His family immigrated to the United States and settled in New York. Margulies studied at the Art Students League from 1922 to 1925 where he was a student of Joseph Pennell. He later studied at Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He also apprenticed with Maynard Waltner in Vienna. Margulies would later teach at City College of New York.

Margulies mastered lithography and etching and became a well-known portrait painter. His studios were located in New York and Gloucester. Margulies was a member of the American Water Color Society, the Chicago Society of Etchers, the Society of American Etchers, the Allied Artists of America, the Audubon Artists, the Salmagundi Club, the North Shore Art Association, and the Gloucester Art Association. He actively exhibited with the associations and clubs he was a member of and his work garnered numerous awards.

The work of Joseph Margulies is represented in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; the Leo Baeck Institute and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York; the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Joseph Margulies died in New York City in 1984.