Born in London in 1928, he studied Painting at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, where he received his diploma in 1951. That same year he was awarded the Abbey Prize at the Prix de Rome. After returning from 6 months spent in Italy, he taught at the Camberwell School of Art in London, before becoming the first Fine Art Fellow at the University of Nottingham in 1956. In 1959 he received a Harkness Scholarship from the Commonwealth Fund, and began to live and paint in New York. Cohen was a central figure in the London art world of the 1960s. His work was exhibited at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London and he represented the United Kingdom in several important international exhibitions. In 1968 he accepted a one-year position as Visiting Professor at the College of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego. Days after there When he arrived, he was shown the university's IT department and he immediately started learning to program. He decided to remain in San Diego as Department Coordinator. In 1972 he was invited to be a Visiting Professor at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University and ended up there. spent two years, during which time he began to create the AARON program and has occupied it ever since. The AARON program is This is the result of Cohen's concern with creating a simulation based on machines of the cognitive process underlying the human act of drawing and coloring. Your work with AARON is an ongoing research effort into the intelligence of autonomous (and art-creating) machines. One of the few artists ever to be deeply involved in artificial intelligence, Cohen has given numerous lectures on his work at the most important conferences in AI, computer graphic design and art technologies.  ;
After returning to San Diego he continued to exhibit, but only works generated by the AARON program; solo exhibitions all over the world. In 1992 he became Founding Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at UCSD.

He passed away on April 27, 2016, in California.