Juan Manuel Gomez-Quiroz (1939 - 2021) was born in Santiago, Chile, and began his formal art studies there. A painter as well as a printmaker, he studied at the Gregorio de la Fuente workshop in 1956 and the following year enrolled at the School of Fine Arts, University of Chile. In 1962 he received a Fulbright Scholarship and traveled to study at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University's School of Art and Architecture.

Eventually, Gomez-Quiroz settled in New York, studied at the Pratt Graphic Center, and was an adjunct professor of art at NYU (New York University) from 1969 to 1976 and also taught at FIT's (Fashion Institute of Technology) Printmaker Workshop. In 1986, he became a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, and he was a member of the jury at the Olympic Arts Competition. His work was greatly influenced by Abstract Expressionism and the techniques and principles of Action Painting which dominated the art world in the 1950s.

He had numerous solo exhibitions in South America, Europe, Canada, Puerto Rico and the United States His work is in the permanent collection of the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, NYC; Metropolitan Museum of Art; NYC Museum of Modern Art; NYC De Menil Collection; Houston, TX; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Brooklyn Museum, NYC; Bronx Museum of Art; NYC Cincinnati Art Museum,OH; Center for Inter-American Relations, NYC; The Chase Manhattan Bank; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago, Chile; New York Public Library, NYC; New York University Art Collection, NYC; University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA; Cornell University, NY; Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena, Puerto Rico; and Instituto de Cultura, Lima, Perú.