Julie Cardenas lives in San Jose, California.

She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a BA in English Literature. After several years teaching in the field of early education, she completed her M.Ed in Arts Integration in Curriculum and Instruction from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. And after several years of an artistic drought, she went back to school to fulfill a childhood dream of getting her MFA in Comics from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA.