Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1955. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1976. Koons lives and works in New York City.

Koons’s work is in numerous public collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), the Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), Los Angeles County Museum (Los Angeles, CA), The Broad Art Foundation (Santa Monica, CA), The National Gallery (Washington, DC), Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA), Tate Gallery (London, UK), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Museum Ludwig (Köln, Germany), Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan).

Koons earned renown for his public sculptures, such as the monumental floral sculpture Puppy (1992), shown at Rockefeller Center and permanently installed at the Guggenheim Bilbao. Another floral sculpture, Split-Rocker (2000), was installed at the Papal Palace in Avignon and at the Palace of Versailles.

Jeff Koons had four major exhibitions at public institutions in 2008: a large survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Celebration sculptures on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and the Palace of Versailles opened its doors to a living artist for the first time with Jeff Koons: Versailles. The Serpentine Gallery presented works from the Popeye series, Koons’s first major exhibition in a public gallery in England in 2009. Artist Rooms, a collection of contemporary art jointed owned by the Tate and the National Gallery of Scotland is currently touring and on view in Edinburgh, Scotland. The collection highlights significant works from Koons’s series The New, Easyfun, Made in Heaven and Banality.

Jeff Koons has received numerous awards and honors in recognition of his cultural achievements. Most recently, the Royal Academy of Arts presented Koons with the John Singleton Copley Award, Koons received The Governor’s Awards for the Arts Distinguished Arts Award and President Jacques Chirac promoted Koons to Officier de la Legion d’Honneur.