James Turrell was born in 1943, in Los Angeles. He studied experimental psychology at Pomona College in Claremont, California, receiving a B.A. in 1965. Having become interested in art, he enrolled at the University of California and created his first light piece, Afrum-Proto, the next year, in which light projected into the corner of a room seemed to form a three-dimensional, illuminated floating cube. Turrell was given his first solo show at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967. The following year, he began making constructions in which light shining out from behind one or more sides of a partition wall dissolved edges and changed the viewer's perception of space in a room. He went on to participate in the Los Angeles County Museum's Art and Technology Program, investigating perceptual phenomena with the artist Robert Irwin and psychologist Edward Wortz.

After receiving his M.A. in 1973, Turrell began work on his first large Skyspace, an aperture cut into the roof of a building that causes the visible plane of the sky to appear flat at the level of the opening. In the UK, James Turrell has created a Skyspace at Kielder Forest in Northumberland. His latest Skyspace, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was revealed in the Spring of 2006.

A solo show of Turrell's work was held in 1976 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. That same year, Turrell created his first Space Division piece, in which an opening onto a space filled with ambient light is seen first as a flat surface and then as a window onto a fog-filled room of uncertain dimensions. Retrospectives of Turrell's work were held in 1980 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and in 1985 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. James Turrell's work can now be seen at the new MOMA - Museum of Modern Art - in New York. There cannot be any doubt about Turrell's commitment to exploring the big questions. In 1974, Turrell located Roden Crater, in northern Arizona, where he has worked for the past thirty years, to refine the site into a monumental observatory for perceiving extraordinary qualities of natural light and celestial events.