Malaquias Montoya was born in 1938 in Albuquerque, New Mexico and raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Montoya received his Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Art from the University of California Berkeley in 1969. Since then he has lectured and taught at numerous colleges and universities in San Francisco Bay Area including Stanford and the California College of the Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA for twelve years, serving for five years as chair of the Ethnic Studies Department. He also served as Director of the Taller de Artes Graficas, in East Oakland. Since 1999, Montoya has held a professorship at the University of California, Davis, teaching in the Department of Art and the Department of Chicana/o Studies. In 2000, he spent a semester as Visiting Professor in the Art department at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana. He currently holds the title of Visiting Fellow in the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame. Along with Carlos Jackson, Montoya co-founded Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer in 2009, where he continues to teach community art classes.