Painter printmaker, digital artist, and educator Robert Eagerton was born in South Carolina in 1940. He received his BFA in painting and printmaking from Atlanta College of Art, with a year abroad in 1959 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria where he focused on printmaking. He then traveled and studied independently in Paris before returning to the U.S. and enrolling in graduate printmaking studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. 

Eagerton cofounded Transfigurations Press in the early 1960s, working with a variety of artists publishing limited editions of lithographs, intaglios, and photography, and in 1965 he began a 40-year teaching career at Herron School of Art and Design in Indiana. In the early 1980s the chemicals for printmaking began taking a toll on Eagerton's health and he began searching for a new form of printmaking that did not require prolonged exposure to inks and acids. This happened to take place during the early years of personal computers, and in 1986 Eagerton began experimenting with digital imagery. It wasn't until the evolution of inkjet printers that he was able to fully realize the physical product from the one he created on the computer screen. In 2008 Eagerton cofounded Heartland Printworks with master digital printer Mary Shaw. 

Eagerton continues to work at Heartland, publishing his own and others' works.