Born in Paris, Françoise Mouly studied architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts and settled in New York in the 1970s, where she became acquainted with avant-garde art and underground comics. That is how she met Art Spiegelman, whom she married and with whom she co-founded Raw magazine in 1980, an experimental platform that published alternative European and American comic authors and promoted creators like Chris Ware and Charles Burns. 

In 1993, she became the art editor of The New Yorker, and since then she has been responsible for choosing more than one thousand covers. They include many iconic images, such as Chris Ware’s series, Rea Irvin’s contemporary versions of Eustace Tilley, and the Twin Towers in black on black after the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001, which she designed herself based on a conversation with Spiegelman.  

In 2000, while researching children’s literature for her own children, she created a children’s division of Raw to publish collections of children’s comics, like the TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics, which later became the publisher for beginning readers, TOON Books (2008). In 2012, she published two books about her work at The New Yorker and edited The Best American Comics 2012. In 2013, Couch House Press published her biography in comic form, called In Love With Art.