Julia Farnsworth Lund Wassmer was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on November 26, 1911. She became interested in the arts at an early age. While at Bryant Junior High School she won a national poster contest sponsored by Keds and was selected as a "junior reporter" for the . Her writing and artistic ambitions continued through high school and college. While at the University of Utah she was elected editor of , a national college publication, and did some illustrations for college literary magazine. In 1935 she became the first student to receive a Master's Degree in Art from the University of Utah. Wassmer's involvement in the Utah art community began as a volunteer in 1933, planning work projects for artists hit hard by the Depression. She went on to supervise the first statewide program for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The success of that project led to further involvement planning projects for the Work Projects Administration. When the Federal Art Project she had proposed was accepted, she became State Art Director and devoted herself full time to art in Utah, developing beautification projects for public facilities, which provided work for artists struggling through the Depression. In 1937 Wassmer moved to New York City where she became a staff member of the Permanent Exhibition of Decorative Arts and Crafts at the Rockefeller Center. She married Theodore Milton Wassmer, another artist, in December 1945. The two spent time in New York City, Cape Cod, Europe, and Woodstock, New York, until 1952 when they settled in the art community at Bearsville (Woodstock), New York, where they continued their artistic pursuits for thirty-three years. In 1985 they returned to Salt Lake City, where Wassmer died in May 1996.