After completing undergraduate and graduate degrees at Notre Dame and the Institute of Design in Chicago, William Maguire returned to live in Homestead where he had grown up. Since 1975 he has been a faculty member in the Art and Art History department at FIU, and he has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and national and regional fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts. Maguire teaches courses in photography and the history of photography including a class concentrating on photography from the 1960s to the present.