Julius Bien was born on September 27, 1826, in Naumberg, Hesse, Germany.

He was an American lithographer. He received his education at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, and then at the Städel Institute in Frankfurt. Like many other Jews, he fought on the side of the liberals in the 1848 Revolution and fled to New York in 1849, where he established a small lithographic business in 1850. His abilities soon earned him many government contracts for engraving and printing major geographic and geological publications, including a map of the territory west of the Mississippi River, which was standard for 25 years. He produced the maps and atlases accompanying the federal census reports from 1870 to 1900, as well as atlases of New York State (1895) and Pennsylvania (1900). He won many awards and became a prominent citizen of New York as well as the first president of the National Lithographers Association (1886–1896). He was also a director of the Hebrew Technical Institute and Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York and a president of B'nai B'rith (1854–1857, 1868–1900), contributing substantially to its internationalization. In the late 1850s, he produced a new full-size edition of John Woodhouse Audubon's The Birds of America.

He died on December 23, 1909, in New York, New York.