Jia Lu was born in 1954 in Beijing and is the daughter of Chinese oil painter Lu Enyi. While living in China, Jia Lu worked as an operating room nurse, an actress and magazine editor. In 1980 she was admitted to the Central Academy of Arts and Design, now part of Tsinghua University and studied under Fan Zeng, graduating in 1983. In 1983, Jia Lu left China to study art in Canada, first at the Toronto School of Art and later as a graduate student at York University Faculty of Visual Arts.