Darcy Bartoletti was born in Tucson, Arizona and grew up in Long Beach, California. He did a semester exchange at the Kunst Akademie in s'Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands in 2004. He later received a BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006 and then moved to Los Angeles.

While living and painting in LA, as a day job he was a studio assistant for artists such as David Hockney, Mike Kelley and Laura Owens. Darcy moved to the island of Kauai in 2018 where he now resides and has his painting studio.