Born in Sri Lanka and primarily raised in England, Julian Lethbridge received his education at Winchester College and Cambridge University. After graduation he began a career in banking but moved to New York City, where he currently resides, to draw and paint. Lethbridge's abstraction is cerebral, often based on mathematical or natural principles. Methodically building up his surfaces with pigment, he then incises them with repeated patterns. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Lethbridge limited his work to shades of black and white, mining the richness of monochromatic painting. More recently he has begun to introduce vibrant colors and more gestural brushwork into his paintings.

Julian Lethbridge's work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and can be found in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), The Tate Gallery (London), The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago), and The National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.). In 1988, he was awarded the Francis J. Greenburger Award. He is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.