Morris Barazani, painter and educator, was born on 24 June 1924 in Highland Park, Michigan but was raised in Detroit. After serving in the United States Navy from 1943 to 1946, he studied at Stanford University in California before enrolling in the Chicago Institute of Design. Then the school was referred to as the New Bauhaus: Chicago School of Design. While at the Institute of Design, Barazani aligned himself with the principles of Laszlo Moholy Nagy.

Barazani married Gail Coninsby, poet and artist, in 1948 and the couple returned to Detroit where he attended Cranbrook Academy of Art and they founded the Circle Gallery, an independent artists' space. In the early 1960s, Barazani returned to Chicago and settled his family in the Andersonville neighborhood. He joined the faculty of DePaul University in 1968 and started its art department. The following year he was hired as director of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle Campus and he worked there for twenty-four years.

Barazani's first solo exhibition was mounted in 1949; his work was included in exhibitions in the early 1950s at the Detroit Institute of Art and the Hanamura Gallery in Detroit; in 1959 his work was included in the sixty-second annual exhibition of Artists of Chicago and Vicinity at the Art Institute of Chicago; and in 2014 a retrospective of his work was mounted at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago.

Morris Barazani died on 28 November 2015 in Stueben, Wisconsin.