Józef Łukaszewicz was born on 13 December 1863 in his family's manor of Bikiškė (Polish: Bykówka) near Vilnius (currently in the Elderate of Medininkai, at the border with Belarus).

There he became friends with Aleksandr Ulyanov and Petr Shevyrev, two young revolutionaries that were preparing an assassination attempt on the life of Alexander III of Russia.

Łukaszewicz became one of the members of the Terrorist Faction of Narodnaya Volya and invited to the circle one of his friends, Bronisław Piłsudski, also a student at the local university.

According to his long-time friend Vera Figner, for his first sketches Łukaszewicz used the soot of his lamp and a blue paint from the walls of his cell.

Initially serving as a supervisor of colleges at the General Commissariat of the Eastern Lands (an agenda of the Ober-Ost), he settled in Vilna and on 1 January 1920 he became a deputy professor in the Chair of Geology of the Stefan Batory University.

On 1 July that year he was promoted to the rank of professor and became the head of the Chair of Physical Geology, a post he held until his death.

He also authored memoirs on the assassination attempt he took part in, first published in a white émigré journal Byloye and then in a book form in 1920.