Joseph Goldyne was born in Chicago in 1942. Expressing an early aptitude for art, Goldyne recalled that his grade school teachers, Mary Glunt and Leonard Breger, encouraged this self-taught pursuit and he would go on to receive his AB in Art History at University of California, Berkeley in 1964, participating in his first gorup exhibition at Gump's Gallery in 1966. However, the drive to settle on a career trajectory directed Goldyne to other interests, especially in science and medicine. After receiving his MD in from the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco in 1968, he realized he could not persist in this career at the cost of the exclusion of art. He went on to earn his MA in Fine Arts at Harvard University in 1970. 

In 1973 Goldyne held his first solo exhibition at San Francisco's Quay Gallery - coincidentally, also the first exhibition in California devoted exclusively to the monoprint, Goldyne's preferred medium. After a successful show, Goldyne continued to exhibit across the U.S., including at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., The Fresno Art Museum, John Berggruen Gallery, Museum of Art at University of Wisconsin, Richard York Gallery in New York, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Goldyne was one of the founders of 3EP Press, "3EP" standing for 3 Equal Partners: Paula Kirkeby, Mary Margaret Anderson and Joseph Goldyne.

Throughout his career, Goldyne has made editioned prints, but his attention has been focused on the unique impression as opposed to the production of editions. For that reason, most of his prints are proofs and very few are editioned. The artist's edition prints was presented in 2001 in the exhibition "Selected Prints", Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, October 6, 2001 December 17, 2001. Since 1985, Joseph Goldyne has created a number of livres d'artiste, working with printer and designers Andrew Hoyem, Peter Koch and Wesley Tanner among others.

Goldyne's work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Museum of FIne Art, Boston, Massachusetts; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Crocker Musem, Sacramento, California; and more.

A complete list of Goldyne's exhibitions, publications, and more can be found at Sullivan Goss Gallery.