Jason Shiga is from from Oakland, California. His father, Seiji Shiga, was an animator who worked on the 1964 Rankin-Bass production Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Shiga was a mathematics major from the University of California at Berkeley.
Shiga is credited as the "Maze Specialist" for Issue #18 (Winter 2005/2006) of the literary journal McSweeney's Quarterly, which features a solved maze on the front cover and a (slightly different) unsolved maze on the back. The title page of each story in the journal is headed by a maze segment labeled with numbers leading to the first pages of other stories.
Shiga has also drawn and written several comics and illustrated features for Nickelodeon Magazine, some of which feature his original creations, and some starring Nickelodeon characters such as SpongeBob Squarepants and the Fairly OddParents.
Shiga makes a cameo appearance in the Derek Kirk Kim comic, Ungrateful Appreciation as a Rubik's Cube-solving nerd.