Ken Jacobs was born in Brooklyn on May 25, 1933, to divorced parents. His mother, an artist, died when he was seven, leaving his father, a former minor league baseball player, to raise him. Jacobs graduated from the City University of New York and, following a two-year stint in the Coast Guard, briefly studied painting under Hans Hofmann. A frequent attendee of Cinema 16, which regularly showed avant-garde works, he turned his Modernist-trained eye toward creating what he would describe as 'Abstract Expressionist cinema.'