Arno Mohr was born in 1910 in Posen (today Poznań, Poland), but grew up in Berlin from 1911 onwards. In 1933–34 he studied at the United State Schools of Free and Applied Art in Berlin-Charlottenburg. After the Second World War, from 1946 to 1975 he was a professor at the Weissensee University of the Arts in East Berlin, of which he was a co-founder. Mohr received numerous honours, for example in 1961 the Käthe Kollwitz Prize of the Academy of Arts of the GDR and in 1980 the National Prize of the GDR. Mohr died in Berlin in 2001.