Willie Torbert was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1959. He studied art at the Pratt Institute, City College of New York, and Medgar Evers College. Before becoming a full-time artist, Torbert taught art in the New York Public School system for ten years. Torbert has spent his life exploring African American culture through creative and complex collage art. He produces highly stylized representations of a wide variety of mostly Afro-Centric themes from musicians and heroic warriors to everyday people. By building up layers of various mediums including collage, watercolor, printmaking and pencil techniques, he has masterfully created his repertoire of textures and patterns to depict composite scenes of African American life.