Joseph Begnaud was born in the winter of 1974 in Jackson, Tennessee. In 1992, Joseph left to attend the University of Dayton in Ohio on a full tuition scholarship. Through the univeristy's Honors Program he received a four-week study grant to live and work in Florence, Italy. This first international experience, which included excursions to Sienna, Rome, and Pompeii, would greatly affect his work, inspiring the “sleep series” begun in the fall of 1995. Directly after completing his BFA in studio arts in 1996, Joseph was awarded another full scholarship to Indiana University in Bloomington. He graduated with Masters of Fine Arts in Painting in 1998. Joseph lived and worked in New York for two years before teaching briefly in Saint Louis, MO and Interlochen, Michigan at the Interlochen Center for the Arts.

In 2001 Joseph accepted a full-time teaching position at the Maine College of Art and took up studio residence in the Artists Studio community at 526 Congress Street. For the last four years, Joseph has been residing during the summers in Warsaw, Poland and studying art in the galleries and museums of Warsaw, Kracow, Wroclaw, Prague, and Vienna. In 2006, he began a collaboration with Stefan Niedzialkowski and the actors of the Mimes Studio in Warsaw which culminated in an exhibition of drawings at the Center for Mazovian Culture in Warsaw, Poland in 2007.

In 2009, Joseph awarded a six month sabbatical grant to create a new body of work inspired by his winters in Maine, titled “Nocturnes.” A solo exhibition of this series debuted at Susan Maasch Fine Art in February, 2010. A traveling exhibition of small works from this series is scheduled to be exhibited in several venues in Poland this fall. A second solo exhibition of new paintings on canvas is being planned at Raven Gallery in Kracow, Poland for the 2010-2011 season.