James H. Carmel was born January 11, 1919 in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of New York City. At age six, his family moved north to the suburb of New Rochelle in Westchester County, NY. In his mid-teens, he qualified to enter the National Academy of Design and won a rare summer fellowship at Laurelton Hall at Oyster Bay, Long Island in the summer of 1936. He left the Academy during his second year to take a position at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in their new Hall of North American Mammals. In 1939, he became the Assistant Preparator at the Cranbrook Institute of Science. He shared a suite at the Academy of Art with Harry Bertoia, and became part of the social life of Cranbrook with Carl Milles, Charles and Catherine Eames, Maija Grotell, Marshall Fredericks, Marianne Strengell, Clifford West and Zoltan Sepeshy.

In 1942, he entered the Army Air Corps and was held as prisoner of war at Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Germany (now Poland) and Moosburg Camp near Munich between 1944 and 1945.

Following the war, he earned an Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Nebraska, and spent two years in London on a Fulbright Scholarship, before returning to Cranbrook. He is the author of ‘Exhibition Techniques: Traveling and Temporary’ (1962). He moved to California in 1973 where he was employed with the George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles. He died on July 30, 2016, aged 97 years.