Josef Albers (Bottrop, Germany, 1888 – New Haven, Connecticut, 1976) was a German-American artist and educator known internationally for his geometric abstractions and his systematic investigation of color. Born into a family of craftsmen, he trained first as a schoolteacher before studying painting in Munich, and in 1920 enrolled as a student at the Weimar Bauhaus.

In 1925, when the school moved to Dessau, Albers was named a Bauhaus master and began teaching design; after the Bauhaus closed under Nazi pressure, he immigrated to the United States in 1933. Together with Anni Albers, he founded the art department at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he led the painting program until 1949 and taught students including Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. From 1950 to 1958, Albers chaired the newly created design department at Yale University in New Haven, where his students included Richard Anuszkiewicz and Eva Hesse.