Julian Stanczak was born in Poland in 1928 and died in Seven Hills, Ohio in March of 2017. He received his M.F.A from Yale University in 1956, where he studied with Josef Albers and Conrad Marca-Relli. His work has been included in exhibitions in the U.S. and internationally from 1948 to the present day. His early life was marked by enormous personal struggle, and equally by his commitment to an uplifted outlook informed by art and music. Forced into a labor camp in Siberia during World War II, he began his art-making in as a teenage refugee in Uganda where he sought to transmit his experience of the stunning light and landscape of East Africa. Stanczak arrived in Cleveland, Ohio in 1950, then took his BFA at the Cleveland Institute of Art; and his MFA at Yale (1956).