Born in San Francisco, California, she was raised in Oakland and graduated from Oakland High School in 1890. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1894 with a degree in civil engineering. At the urging of her friend and mentor Bernard Maybeck, whom she met in her final year in undergraduate school, she headed to Paris to apply to the famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Denied at first because the school was not accepting women, and a second time because she failed the entrance exam (she claimed in a letter that she had been failed deliberately because she was a woman), after two years she finally passed the entrance exams in the architecture program, placing 13th out of 376 applicants, and was duly admitted. She was the first woman to graduate with a degree in architecture from the school in Paris.

Upon her return from Paris she took employment with the San Francisco architect John Galen Howard who was at that time supervising the University of California Master Plan. Morgan worked on several buildings on the Berkeley campus, most notably providing the decorative elements for the Hearst Mining Building, and designs for the Hearst Greek Theatre.

In 1904, she opened her own office in San Francisco. One of her earliest works from this period was North Star House in Grass Valley, California, commissioned in 1906 by mining engineer Arthur De Wint Foote and his wife, the author and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote. Naturally, many commissions followed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, ensuring her financial success.

Hearst projects

The most famous of Morgan's patrons was the newspaper magnate and antiquities collector William Randolph Hearst, who had been introduced to Morgan by his mother Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the chief patroness of the University of California at Berkeley. It is believed that this introduction led to Morgan's first downstate commission by Hearst, circa 1914, for the design of the Los Angeles Examiner Building, a Mission revival style project that included contributions by Los Angeles architects William J. Dodd and J. Martyn Haenkel.It's closed but still located at the southwest corner of Broadway and 11th Streets on a city block in Downtown Los Angeles, awaiting adaptive reuse.

In 1919 Hearst selected Morgan as the architect for La Cuesta Encantada, better known as Hearst Castle, which was built atop the family campsite overlooking San Simeon harbor. The project proved to be her largest and most complex, as Hearst's vision for his estate grew ever grander during planning and construction over the decades. It later included The Hacienda, a residence — private guest house complex built in hybrid Mission Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, and Moorish Revival styles. It was located a day's horseback ride inland from Hearst Castle next to the Mission San Antonio de Padua near Jolon, California. Her work on 'the Castle' and San Simeon Ranch continued until 1937, ending only due to Hearst's declining health.

Morgan became William Randolph Hearst's principal architect, producing the designs for dozens of buildings, such as Phoebe Apperson Hearst's Wyntoon he inherited, it's also a 'castle,' with a "Bavarian village" of four villas all on of forest reserve with the McCloud River near Mount Shasta) in Northern California. She also did studio and site work for the uncompleted Babicora, Hearst's 1,625,000-acre Chihuahua, Mexico cattle rancho and retreat.

YWCA projects

Julia Morgan’s affiliation with the YWCA began when Phoebe Apperson Hearst recommended her for the organization’s Asilomar summer conference center. The Asilomar Conference Center, no longer YWCA but State run, is still in Pacific Grove near Monterey, California. Morgan designed YWCAs in California, Utah, Arizona, and Hawaii.

Five of the Southern California YWCA buildings were designed by Morgan.The 1918 Harbor Area YWCA in a Craftsman building is still standing, as is the 1926 Hollywood Studio Club YWCA. Morgan’s Riverside YWCA from 1929 still stands, but as the Riverside Art Museum. Her 1925 Long Beach Italian Renaissance branch has been demolished. The "gorgeous" Pasadena YWCA is being acquired by the city for restoration and public use in 2010, after several decades of abandonment, closure, and slowly falling apart.

There are also Northern California YWCAs in San Francisco's Chinatown and Oakland.

Other projects

Other projects include the Mills College Julia Morgan buildings in the East Bay foothills of Oakland, California:

• El Campanil, believed to be the first bell tower on a United States college campus < and the first reinforced concrete structure on the west coast. Morgan's reputation grew when the tower was unscathed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The bells in the tower "were cast for the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago-1893) and given to Mills by a trustee".
• The Margaret Carnegie Library (1906), named after Andrew Carnegie's daughter.
• The Ming Quong Home for Chinese girls, built in 1924 and purchased by Mills in 1936, which was renamed Alderwood Hall and now houses the Julia Morgan School for Girls.
• The Student Union (1916)
• Kapiolani Cottage, which has served as an infirmary, faculty housing, and administration offices.
• Mills's original gymnasium and pool, which have been replaced by the Tea Shop and Suzanne Adams Plaza.

The former St. John's Presbyterian Church, is now the 'Julia Morgan Center for the Arts' on CollegeAvenue in Berkeley, California. Others are the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, , the sanctuary of Ocean Avenue Presbyterian Church at 32 Ocean Avenue, San Francisco, where Mission Bay Community Church also meets, and the large Berkeley City Club, adjacent to University of California. Her work also included a World War I YWCA Hostess House in Palo Alto which was later the site of the MacArthur Park Restaurant MacArthur Park — Fine Dining, Events and Catering in Palo Alto, CA: Home Page

Some of her residential projects, most of them located in the San Francisco Bay Area, may be categorized as ultimate bungalows, a term often associated with the work of Greene and Greene and some of Morgan's other contemporaries and teachers, express the Arts and Crafts Movement in the American Craftsman style of architecture. Several houses are on San Francisco's Russian Hill, as was her own residence.

Julia Morgan is buried in the Mountain View Cemetery in the hills of Oakland, California.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced on May 28, 2008 that Julia Morgan would be inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. The induction ceremony took place on December 15 and her great-niece accepted the honor in her place.