Joyce Wahl Treiman painter, printmaker, sculptor and teacher, was born in Evanston, Illinois on May 22, 1922. She earned her associates degree from Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, before beginning her studies at the State University of Iowa. She studied with Philip Guston and Lester Longman, earning her B.F.A. and a Graduate Fellowship in 1943.

Her first solo exhibition was mounted in 1942 at the Paul Theobald Gallery in Chicago and another solo exhibition followed at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947. Treiman taught in Winnetka, Illinois from 1955 to 1959. She moved to Los Angeles in 1960, and her first California exhibition was at the Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles the next year. She was a Visiting Artist at the Art Center School in Los Angeles during the summer of 1968, Artist-in-Residence at the San Fernando Valley State College between 1968 and 1969, and a lecturer at the University of California at Los Angeles between 1969 and 1970. The number of her solo exhibitions is eclipsed by a rigorous yearly group exhibition schedule. Her election to membership of the National Academy of Design in 1990 distinguished her long career in art.

Treiman won numerous awards and prizes, including a Tiffany Fellowship, Logan Prize from the Herron Art Institute, Pauline Palmer Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago, a Tamarind Lithography Fellowship, and a Visual Arts Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Los Angeles Times named Treiman Woman of the Year in Art in 1965. Public collections holding her work include the Oakland Museum, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, University of California at Santa Cruz, Art Institute of Chicago, Denver Museum of Art, Long Beach Art Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Portland Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Joyce Treiman died in Santa Monica, California on June 2, 1991.