Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel (Lieberman) Shan.

[1] His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir (Ukmergė).

Shahn's early experiences with lithography and graphic design are apparent in his later prints and paintings which often include the combination of text and image.

Although Shahn attended New York University as a biology student in 1919, he went on to pursue art at City College in 1921 and then at the National Academy of Design.

"[3] There he studied great European artists such as Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Georges Rouault, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee.

Contemporaries who would make a profound impact on Shahn's work and career include artists Walker Evans, Diego Rivera and Jean Charlot.

[4] The 23 gouache paintings of the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti communicated the political concerns of his time, rejecting academic prescriptions for subject matter.

[3] Fortunately, in 1935, Shahn was recommended by Walker Evans, a friend and former roommate, to Roy Stryker to join the photographic group at the Resettlement Administration (RA).

[6] In 1939, Shahn and his wife produced a set of 13 murals inspired by Walt Whitman's poem I See America Working and installed at the Bronx Central Annex Post Office.

[3] His art's anti-war sentiment found other forms of expression in a series of paintings from 1944 to 1945, such as Death on the Beach, which depicts the desolation and loneliness of war.

[14][15] From 1961 to 1967, Shahn worked on the stained glass at Temple Beth Zion, a Buffalo, NY synagogue designed by Harrison & Abramovitz.

[3] After his death, William Schuman composed "In Praise of Shahn", a modern canticle for orchestra, first performed January 29, 1970, by the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein conducting.

"[20] References to allegory, the Torah, humanistic content, childhood, science, music and the commonplace are other motifs Shahn draws upon to make the universal personal for his viewers.

[20] Handball demonstrates his "use of architectural settings as both psychological foil to human figures and as expressive abstract pattern,"[20] and is also an example of his use of photographs as source material.

His c.1933 untitled Gelatin silver print held in the Fogg Art Museum (Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gift of Mrs. Bernarda B. Shahn) of handball players was made around 1933 just after he took up photography and before his period as a FSA photographer.

To make the painting of the scene six years later, Shahn transcribed the positions of the handball players including the photographic accident of a tensed arm and leg that appears to sprout from the bomber jacket of the man at left, but he spreads the men away from each other and expands the frame to break the symmetry and to include a brownstone building over the top of the wall, and to encompass also a billboard at left.

To achieve these candid shots Shahn often used a right-angle viewfinder on his 35mm Leica; he can be seen using it in a window reflection in an untitled picture from his 1938 series made in Circleville, Ohio.

According to art historian Diana L. Linden, the panels' sequence relates to that of the Haggadah, the Jewish Passover Seder text which follows a narrative of slavery, deliverance and redemption.

National immigration quotas also reflected the strained foreign relations of the United States at a time when fascism, Nazism, and communism were on the rise.

To illustrate the political and social adversary, Shahn incorporated loaded iconography: Nazi soldiers, anti-Jewish signs and the executed Italian anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti.

Below, Shahn's mother and Albert Einstein lead immigrants on a gangplank situated by the Ellis Island registry center and the Statue of Liberty.

On the right, Shahn depicts the inhuman labor situation in the form of "lightless sweatshops ... tedious and backbreaking work with outmoded tools.

Here, a figure resembling labor leader John L. Lewis protests in front of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, where a devastating fire occurred and the movement for the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) began.

The arriccio, sinopia drawings of the fresco for Ben Shahn's Jersey Homesteads mural were removed from its original community center location in Roosevelt and is now permanently installed in a custom-designed gallery on the second floor of the United States Post Office and Courthouse at in Camden.