Jacques Hnizdovsky was born on January 27, 1915, in Ukraine during a period of political upheaval. As the youngest of seven children, he was away at boarding school when his family faced Siberian exile for being titled landowners, and at age 14, he would never see his family again. He received a scholarship to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. When Germany bombed Warsaw in 1939, the Academy closed and Hnizdovsky fled Poland to continue his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he graduated with honors and completed two additional years of post-graduate studies with his own Master's Studio.

Upon graduation, Hnizdovsky found himself stateless in war-torn Europe and spent time in a displaced persons camp in Weyarn, Germany, before emigrating to the United States in 1949. He arrived in Minneapolis with nothing, initially working as a commercial artist painting calendars for Brown & Bigelow in Minnesota. A turning point came in 1950 when A. Hyatt Mayor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art chose one of his woodcuts for a Purchase Award at a Minneapolis Institute of Arts print exhibition. This recognition prompted him to abandon commercial work and move to New York City to pursue an independent artistic career.

During the 1950s, Hnizdovsky experimented with various media including oil, watercolor, tempera, pen and ink, and terra-cotta sculpture, while developing the stylized realism that characterized his work. He focused on nature, flora and fauna, drawing inspiration from Albrecht Dürer, Japanese printmaking, and Chinese brush painting. His artistic crisis of the 1950s was resolved during a trip to Paris, where he met his future wife and participated in exhibitions including the Salon d'Automne du Grand Palais.

Hnizdovsky became a master printmaker, creating over 375 prints during his lifetime alongside an equal number of paintings. He was self-taught in printmaking techniques, working with woodcuts, linocuts, and etchings. His process involved weeks or months of intricate cutting for larger woodcuts, printing trial proofs, and producing final limited editions of 100 to 150 prints on Japanese washi paper. He worked on paintings during the day and prints in the evenings, and was skilled enough to print editions for other artists.

His work is held in permanent collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art, Library of Congress, The White House, Yale University, Cleveland Museum of Fine Arts, Chrysler Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, New York Public Library, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Winnipeg Art Gallery, among many others.

Hnizdovsky also illustrated numerous books including works by John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Frost. He passed away on November 8, 1985, in New York at age 70, just days after completing his final woodcut, "Washington Monument." He is buried at Lychakivskiy Cemetery in Lviv, Ukraine.