Robert C. Morgan is a prominent American artist, critic, and art historian. Born in 1943, in Massachusetts, he left the state after completing a college dregree in European history. He spent time teaching in Southern California before returning to Massachusetts in order to pursue his acquired interest in art. Upon his return, he began painting and showing his work in and around the Boston area. During the early 1970s he transitioned into conceptual art. He attributes the shift to the influence of Danish physicist Hans Fogerby, a personal friend, whose work in quantum physics inspired him to experiment with structural concepts of geometry and time. Morgan eventually enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he earned an MFA in Sculpture in 1975. Even as he delved into sculpture and conceptual art, he continued his painting and photography, and by the mid-1970s he was exhibiting his work at the Artists Space and Whitney Museum in New York City. At that time, he entered the doctoral program in contemporary art at the School of Education, New York University. He earned his Ph.D in 1978, after producing a dissertation titled "The Role of Documentation in Conceptual Art: An Aesthetic Inquiry," which was the first such study of conceptual art in the U.S. The dissertation was eventually revised and published as Conceptual Art: An American Perspective (McFarland & Company, 1994).

After receiving his Ph.D., Morgan turned his attention to art history and art criticism, fields in which he had grown more interested in the early 1970s, and to teaching in the academy. He would go on to teach at a number of institutions, including the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he was appointed Professor Emeritus in 2003, and publish prolifically. Currently, he is the author of more than 2800 essays and reviews, and several books, including Conceptual Art: An American Perspective (McFarland & Company, 1994), Art into Ideas: Essays on Conceptual Art (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Between Modernism and Conceptual Art (McFarland, 1997), The End of the Art World (Allworth Press, 1998), Robert Barry (Karl Kerber Verlag, 1986), and Bernar Venet 1961-1970 (Éditions des Cahiers Intempestifs, 1999), Bruce Nauman (John Hopkins University, 2002), Late Writings: Clement Greenberg (University of Minnesota, 2003), and The Artist and Globalization (The Municipal Gallery of Art, Lodz, Poland, 2008). Morgan's writings have been translated into seventeen languages, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, Serbian, Hebrew, Farsi, and Finnish. His highly regarded writing in art history and criticism earned him an invitation in 1992 to be the first Critic-in-Residence at the Art Omi International Artists Workshop in Ghent, New York, as well as the first Arcale Prize in International Art Criticism, which he received in Salamanca, Spain in 1999. In 2011 he was inducted into the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg, Austria.

Morgan's scholarship and art work continued to evolve during the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Besides curating and displaying his own abstract art in over seventy exhibitions in various museums, cultural spaces, and galleries across the United States and abroad, he received several prestigious fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities (1980, 1986, 1987), a Rockefeller/NEA grant (1988), and a Francis Greenburger Fellowship (1993). In 2005, he was awarded an Edward Albee Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship as a senior scholar to research "The Traditional Arts and the Korean Avant-garde" in the Republic of Korea. His four-month Fulbright stay in Korea was in keeping with his interest in artistic expressions rooted outside the West. Much of his work since the late 1990s has focused on art in the Middle East and East Asia. In addition to working extensively with contemporary ink artists in China, and authoring many catalogs and monographs on Chinese artists, he has lectured and displayed his work at several Biennials and Art Fairs in China, Korea, Singapore, Turkey, Indonesia, and Iran.

Morgan currently lives in New York City, where he lectures at the School of Visual Arts and is Adjunct Professor in the graduate fine arts department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.