Best known as a painter of surrealist imagery, Boris Margo was born in Wolotschisk, Ukraine, in Russia. In 1919 he enrolled at the Polytechnik of Art at Odessa, and in 1924 received a grant to study at the Futemas (Workshop for the Art of the Future) in Moscow. A second grant enabled him to study the work of the Old Masters in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad and to attend Pavel Filonov's Analytical School of Art in 1927.
In 1928 Margo received a certificate from the Polytechnik and immigrated to Montreal, where he worked as a muralist for a year. Moving to New York City in 1930, he studied at the Roerich Museum, and two years later began teaching there. He began experimenting with celluloid and acetone in his printmaking and was also an early user of the decalomania technique in oil painting.
In 1943 he became an American citizen. Five years later Margo founded a Creative Art Seminar (later called Artists Gallery) in Orlando, Florida, and a year later established a similar venture in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Margo's first solo exhibition was at the Artists Gallery in New York City. Other important shows were held at the Brooklyn Museum, the Tweed Gallery at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York in 1993.