Carrington was born at Hampstead in north London into an artistic family, her father being the publisher and designer Noel Carrington while the artist Dora Carrington, who she never met, was an aunt. At the start of World War II, the family moved to Lambourn in Berkshire where her father worked on a farm and Joanna Carrington developed what would become a life-long love of the countryside. Aged seventeen she studied at the summer school in east Anglia run by Cedric Morris, who was greatly impressed by her talent for painting. Carrington then moved to Paris where she studied in the studio of Fernand Léger. Returning to England, Carrington studied at the Central School of Art and Design in London from 1949 to 1952, where she was taught by both Mervyn Peake and Keith Vaughan. While at the Central, Carrington won a Queen's Scholarship and was included in a group exhibition, Six Young Contemporaries at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in central London during 1952.
