Steve Gianakos was born in New York in 1938 and began developing his artistic language in the mid-1960s, in the midst of the Pop Art explosion. He studied at the Pratt Institute in New York. He was awarded major prizes and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (1995) and the Pollock-Krasner Prize (1996).

His works feature in the most prestigious American public collections—MoMA, the Guggenheim, the New York Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Neuberger Museum, the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston), the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum of Chicago, the University Museum (Berkeley), the Judith Rothschild Contemporary, the Chase Manhattan Bank —as well as the CNAP collections in France.

He participated in more than thirty exhibitions worldwide: at Guggenheim, PS1 (MoMA)and the Leo Castelli, Marian Goodman and Barbara Gladstone galleries. He has participated in collective exhibitions at the MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum and the Queens Museum in New York and the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht.
In 2017, the Musée des beaux arts de Dole in France, held a large retrospective exhibition of his oeuvres.