Miguel Covarrubias was best known as an illustrator, writer, and anthropologist. He was born November 22, 1904, in Mexico City, into an upper-middle-class family. His father, José Covarrubias Acosta, was a civil engineer who held various prominent positions in the government, and his mother, Elena Duclaud, was from a family that included Spanish aristocracy.

Covarrubias left school at age fourteen and began work at the Secretaría de Comunicaciones as a draughtsman of maps and street plans. In his free time he would take his sketchbook to theaters and cafés and draw caricatures. His caricatures were first published in 1920 in a National University student magazine, . From 1921 to 1923 his illustrations appeared in large circulation newspapers such as , , and the .

Covarrubias' caricatures brought him notice among the artistic circle of Mexico City, and he became acquainted with its members, including the poet José Juan Tablada, who helped arrange for a travel grant from the Mexican government to pay for Covarrubias' move to New York in 1923. A friend of Tablada arranged for him to meet Carl Van Vechten, who in turn introduced Covarrubias to his celebrity acquaintances. Van Vechten also sent Covarrubias to , and in January 1924 his drawings were first published in the magazine. The following year his drawings appeared in ; his work would later appear in , , and other magazines. His first book, , was published in 1925 by Alfred A. Knopf.

In 1930 Covarrubias married Rosa Rolanda (born Rosamonde Cowen), a stage dancer, and the two traveled to Bali for a lengthy honeymoon. Covarrubias returned to Bali in 1933 with a Guggenheim Fellowship to research the culture, resulting in his book (1937).

After his father's death in 1936, Covarrubias bought his parents' house -- the house in which he had grown up -- in Tizapán, outside of Mexico City. Here he and Rosa entertained a wide assortment of international celebrity guests, such as Diego Rivera, Georgia O'Keeffe, Orson Welles, Merce Cunningham, Luis Buñuel, John Huston, Amelia Earhart, Nelson Rockefeller, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

During the 1930s, when there was less magazine illustration work to be had ( ceased publication in 1937), Covarrubias devoted more time to the research of indigenous cultures, particularly those of Mexico. In 1937 he began working on a book for Knopf, , a project that would take years of research before it was finally published in 1946.

In 1938 Covarrubias was invited to paint a series of pictorial maps for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. He provided , six murals mapping the countries of the Pacific Rim. With pictorial elements Covarrubias considered most characteristic and representative, each panel presents a different theme: peoples, fauna and flora, art forms, economy, dwellings, and means of transportation.

In the 1940s and 1950s Covarrubias' activities branched out to include museum work and dance production, among other things. He participated in the organization of several museum exhibitions in the United States and Mexico. He received the first museology teaching appointment in Mexico and taught anthropology and art history courses at the Museo Nacional de Antropología and the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Composer Carlos Chávez, director of the new Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, appointed Covarrubias as director of the Institute's dance academy in 1950. Covarrubias mounted thirty-four ballets with the INBA and provided sets for many of the productions. He also continued providing book illustrations, mainly for works on anthropological subjects.

Covarrubias died February 4, 1957, in Mexico City.