Painter, designer, printmaker, and teacher, José Alves de Moura was born on 21 August 1944 in Recife, Brazil. He was enrolled in the Architectural Drawing and Decoration Course at the Federal Technical School of Permanbuco from 1962 to 1965. Between the years 1966 and 1969, he worked toward a degree in Drawing and also took painting and sculpture courses at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE).

José de Moura wrote about his introduction to lithography, “The first time I came into contact with lithography was in 1976, when visiting my friends Delano and João Câmara, I found them working on material that was previously unknown to me. They drew with greasy Crayon on a limestone (special stone). João offered me a pencil and a stone, which I accepted without hesitation. This was the neighborhood of Campo Grande, on Rua Guaianases, which gave rise to the name of one of the largest engraving workshops in the country, of which I am pleased to be one of the founders.” In 1979, he served as director-treasurer and director-president of Oficina Guaipases de Engraving.

In 1982, he studied in Barcelona, Spain and, in 1988, he was a professor of the Drawing and Painting Courses at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Pernambuco. Between 1973 and 1993, José de Moura had at least twenty solo exhibitions and his work was included in numerous collective exhibitions throughout Brazil, as well as in France and Uruguay.

Ariano Suassuna wrote of the work of J. de Moura, ‘To this family of ''Northeastern Surrealism'', which reaches its highest point with the Brazilian paintings of João Câmara, now joins, as a kind of younger brother, the young painter José Alves de Moura Son (J. de Moura). His paintings and lithographs purposely make a kind of appeal to traditional techniques to better subvert them and also subvert certain values, from an ironic and critical angle.’'

[Reference: much of this information is drawn from the website of the Rodrigues Galeria de Artes located in Recife, Brazil.]