Julia Harnett Harvey was born in Essex, England. After graduating from the Southend-on-sea College of Art, she worked in varied art forms in the commercial field in England and Canada. It was during these years that Julia first became involved with the motion picture industry,

an involvement that lasted seventeen years. Joining a prestigious Canadian film studio and working in the animation department, Julia's talents were quickly utilized on the production of many animated educational and commercial films for national and international accounts. Her last year in Canada was spent with a joint American-Canadian studio animating a television series produced for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Julia was later to pursue this line of work in 1968 when she joined the Hanna-Barbera studios in Hollywood, California, creators of the world renowned "Flinstones", "Tom and Jerry", and "yogi Bear".

It was at the studio that she worked on two animated feature films for international distribution, "Charlotte's Web" from the classic American book and "Heidi's Song", a musical version of the famous story. On both features she specialized in the exacting work of drawing the films main characters. During this time, Julia owned and operated a popular studio gallery in North Hollywood with her husband, artist Maurice Harvey. She divided her time between animation, teaching classes in painting and life drawing, producing design and illustration for a Walt Disney magazine and editing a Walter Foster art instruction book, after "Landscape/Seascape in Acrylics" by Maurice Harvey. After many busy years Julia and her husband sold their gallery to concentrate on their fine art careers. Julia Harnett now resides and paints in her Carmel Valley home and studio working solely in the medium of transparent watercolors.