Painter and printmaker Jorge Goya-Lukich was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1924. He attended Western Reserve University in the late 1930s as a student of mathematics and physics, but with the onset of the Second World War he was stationed in Marin County, California. A chance visit to the San Francisco Museum of Art inspired him to pursue painting, and following the war he enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Fransisco Art Institute) where he studied from 1947 to 1950. Among his instructors were Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Stanley William Hayter.

He went on to study at San Francisco State College (B.A.) and the University of Oregon (M.F.A.). Goya-Lukich then taught art at the University of Oregon from 1952 to '53, and in 1955 he moved to New York where he took a position as a technical advisor at the Robert Blackburn Lithography Workshop. In the late 1950s he was employed as a mathematics teacher at Staten Island Academy of Art & Science and at the Fieldstone School. He contributed to Reviewer and Arts magazines. 

Selected exhibitions:
1948: Oakland Museum of Art, CA (OMA); San Francisco Museum of Art, CA (SFMA)
1950: M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; SFMA
1951: OMA; SFMA (prize); University of Washington, WA; Portland Museum of Art, OR
1952: SFMA; University of Oregon, OR
1957, 1958: Camino Gallery, New York, NY
1958: Columbia University