Perhaps one of the most successful contemporary artists and printmakers of his generation, Noda Tetsuya was born on March 5, 1940, in Uki, Kumamoto Prefecture. Noda studied woodblock printmaking under sosaku hanga artist Tadashige Ono at the Tokyo University of Arts before graduating in 1960. He completed his graduate studies five years later and joined the Nihon Hanga Kyokai organization in 1969. That same year, Noda took an eight-month trip around the world, documenting his travels through photography; notably, he had the uncanny ability to take photographs at the ideal moment, suggesting both movement and stillness simultaneously. 

His primary medium was mimeographs reproduced through stencils and applied with silkscreen over woodblock-printed backgrounds. Over the next decade, Noda exhibited both in Japan and at various international biennales including Tokyo (1968, 1976), Krakow (1970, 1974), Norway (1974, 1978), Frenchen (1976), and Ljubljana (1977). In 1977 he was appointed to a faculty position at the Tokyo University of Arts, where he served as an instructor. Noda continued to produce print series and photographs, and throughout the 1980's served as a visiting artist at several universities in Canada, Israel, the U.S., and Australia. Additionally, Noda held a number of solo exhibitions at the Norwegian International Print Biennale, the International Print Exchange Exhibition in Seoul, the Osaka National Museum of Art, and the Cincinnati Museum of Art. Furthermore, select works are now in the collections of leading museums such as the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian, The British Museum, and the Israel Museum. 

Noda Tetsuya's most popular ongoing series, Diary, began with his travels abroad in the late 1960s and continues into the present day (with five hundred prints in the current collection). Images feature Noda's extensive trips and family activities, capturing slice-of-life moments that are humorous, intimate, and deeply personal. Noda currently lives in Tokyo with his family and is a professor emeritus of the Tokyo University of the Arts.