Janise Yntema was born in 1962 in New Jersey. She attended St John the Divine Stoneyard Institute. Yntema studied at the Art Students League of New York in 1979. From 1980 to 1984, she studied at Parsons School of Design, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts. In 2020 she received a Master of Arts from the Paris School of History and Culture, University of Kent with a dissertation titled "ECOACTIVISM: Framing the Geopolitics of  Contemporary Landscape and its Representation".
