George Miyasaki, painter, printmaker, and teacher, was born in Kalopa, Hawaii on 24 March 1935. He moved to California in 1953 with the intention of pursuing a commercial art degree at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. After a short time, he was persuaded by Manuel Neri, Bruce McGaw, and other friends to switch his major to fine arts. Miyasaki studied painting with Richard Diebenkorn, and printmaking with Leon Goldin. Nathan Oliveira introduced him to color lithography in 1956.

Miyasaki quickly grasped the basic concepts and produced a body of highly experimental color lithographs. A few of which were exhibited at the Fourth International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1956. Miyasaki received his BFA in 1957 and his MFA in 1958 from the California College of Arts and Crafts and the following year his work was included in the American Prints Today traveling exhibition sponsored by the Print Council of America. His first solo exhibition was held at the Gump’s Gallery in San Francisco in 1957, and in 1961, he had solo exhibitions at the Richmond Art Center in California and the Paul Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for 1963 and traveled to Europe the following year with his family.

Between 1958 and1964, Miyasaki was an Assistant Professor at California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. During that period, he was a visiting lecturer at Stanford University for one year. In 1964, Miyasaki joined the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley, where he retired as Full Professor in 1994 after three decades of teaching. While at Berkeley, he designed and developed a world-class printmaking studio, still in use today.

Miyasaki had over thirty solo exhibitions and his work was included in 300 national and international exhibitions. Besides the Guggenheim Fellowship, he was awarded National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1980 and 1985.

George Miyasaki is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Hawaii; the Herbert Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; the Oakland Museum of California; the British Museum, London; the Museum of Modern Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Portland Art Museum, Maine; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.

Miyasaki continued to live and work in Berkeley until his death on 21 October 2013.