Josef Stoitzner was born in February 1884 in Vienna.

He received his first artistic training at the Vienna School of Applied Arts under Kenner. From 1906 to 1908 he studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under Rumpler. In 1905 he started to work as an art teacher and took a teaching examination in 1909 which allowed him to succeed the landscape painter Tina Blau as a teacher at the Vienna Women's Academy from 1916 to 1919. From 1922 he worked as an inspector for the drawing classes at the federal educational institutions in Vienna, Traiskirchen, Wiener Neustadt and Graz -Liebenau and from 1937 on also as an inspector for drawing and handcraft classes at the boys secondary schools in Vienna. His many years of teaching eventually led him back to the Vienna Academy, where he taught as a lecturer from 1932 to 1944 .

In the printing techniques he dealt intensively with the color woodcut and with lithography. In 1914 he was awarded the gold medal of the Exhibition of Printing Arts and Art Design in Leipzig as well as the medal of the city of Graz. Already in 1909 he joined the Vienna Secession and became a member of the Vienna Künstlerhaus in 1939 .

Stoitzner died on 6 July 1951 in Bramberg im Pinzgau (Land Salzburg).