Christensen was born in 1942 and raised in Culver City, California. He
studied painting at Brigham Young University and, for a while, the University of
California at Los Angeles before finishing his formal education at BYU.
Since then, he has had one-man shows in the West and the Northeast, and his work
is prized in collections throughout the U.S. and Europe.
The artist has been commissioned by both Time/Life Books and Omni to create
illustrations for their publications and his work has appeared in the
prestigious American Illustration Annual and Japan's Outstanding American
Illustrators. Christensen has also won all the professional art honors the
World Science Fiction Convention can bestow, as well as multiple Chelsey Awards
form the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists.
Christensen's fine art now appears as works of art in porcelain from The
Greenwich Workshop Collection, artist-inspired products such as note cards, silk
ties and books. The first, A Journey of the Imagination: The Art of
James Christensen, was published to great acclaim in 1994. His second, the
adventure fantasy Voyage of the Basset, has more than 75, 000 copies in
print. His third, the inventive Rhymes and Reasons, was published in May,
1997.