Norio Azuma was born in Kii-Nagashima-cho, Japan on November 23, 1928. He attended the Kanazawa Art College in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan. At some point he immigrated to the United States.

In the US Azuma continued his art studies at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and then at the Art Student's League in New York. Azuma worked as a printmaker, experimenting using the medium of screen printing (serigraphy) on canvas, then a relatively new development in the evolution of printmaking. Azuma worked for two years perfecting this technique and used up to 18 screens in printing his serigraphs.

New York Times art critic, John Canaday, once described one of Azuma's serigraphs as “so beautiful a manipulation of shape, color and texture that it eliminates my lingering objections to serigraphy as a technique.”

Azuma exhibited internationally, including: 30 Contemporary American Artists, USIA; 28th Corcoran Biennial Exhibition, Washington, DC; the 3rd International Triennial of Original Graphics; Contemporary American Artists at The White House; Sculputure and Prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Kagai Sakka Ten at the Tokyo Modern Museum of Art; and American Art Today at the New York World's Fair.

His work can also be found in numerous collections, including: Whitney Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Seattle Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, State University of Potsdam, Smithsonian Institute, The Free Library of Philadelphia, Library of Congress and Chase Manhattan, to name a few.

Norio Azuma died in New York, New York February 4, 2004