Joe Tilson was born in 1928 in London. He began working as a carpenter and then he enlisted in the military from 1944 to 1946. After the war, he attended art school beginning his artistic career, marked right from the start by his encounters with Hamilton and Paolozzi. In 1952 he moved to Rome for a scholarship and traveled around Italy (first Sicily and then Venice) together with his future wife Joslyn Morton. He returned to London and devoted himself to teaching until 1963, and after that he taught in New York and Hamburg.