Judith Aronson has a BA in American Studies from the University of Michigan, and from Yale University a Master’s in City Planning and an MFA in Graphic Design. For three years in the 1970s she travelled and worked in South East Asia, including a year assisting the photographer and director of the InSight Guides, Hans Hoefer. For twelve years Aronson lived in England, where she worked as a graphic designer and photojournalist for, among others, the Sunday Telegraph Magazine. Residing in Boston since 1986 and returning to England for the summers, she practices graphic design and photography while teaching.

Now a full-time professor in the Communications Department at Simmons College, she teaches graphic design. Her special interests are typography, information architecture and wayfinding. Three exhibitions of her portrait work, Faces (1998-9), featured photographs of writers and artists. Many of these appeared in the Threepenny Review (2003). In 2006, the Isole Gallery of Art and Industrial Design, Boston, held a two-part retrospective entitled Tactile | Mercantile of 100 color photographs, all featured in the catalogues, from South East Asia, England and the United States, entitled Tactile | Mercantile.

Many exhibitions of the photographs in Likenesses have occurred since the book came out in 2010, the most recent being at The Royal West of England Academy from February 8, 2014 to March 20, 2014 .