Art Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, but as a child moved with his family to New York City, where he currently resides. There, he met underground comic artists who were interested in photojournalism and protest literature, influences that are apparent in his work. In Maus, he tells the story of his father, a Polish Jew who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, generating new stylistic resources to tell the story of the Holocaust like never before. The work earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, making him the first comic creator to receive the award.

In addition to Maus, his standout works include In the Shadow of No Towers (Viking, 2004) about the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. His career has also involved collaborations with well-known media outlets like The New Yorker and the creation, in 1980, together with his partner, the editor Françoise Mouly, of Raw, an avant-garde comics and graphic art magazine that influenced an entire generation in the eighties and nineties and was a pioneer in publishing current big names in comics, such as Charles Burns and Chris Ware. In 2025, Spiegelman published a comic strip with Joe Sacco about the current situation in Gaza and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.