Judy Klemesrud, a journalist, was born in Iowa in 1939. She graduated from high school in Thompson, Iowa, and attended the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa) School of Journalism, graduating in 1961. She later completed graduate work at Columbia University's School of Journalism. Klemesrud's reporting career began at an early age. Before attending the State University of Iowa she wrote for two of her father's papers, the Thompson Courier and the Rake Register. While attending the university, she held editorial positions at The Daily Iowan.

After graduation and before her work at the New York Times, Klemesrud spent four years as a general assignment reporter for the Chicago Daily News. Her career at the New York Times spanned nineteen years, starting in 1966. She mainly wrote for the Style Department, reporting on the women's movement and social changes of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. Several topics included the increasing participation of women in the labor force, divorce and the family, and pornography and society. About one-fifth of her articles from 1970 to 1985 were about the women's movement and its issues. She also wrote celebrity profiles of actors and actresses both from Hollywood and Broadway and contributed to various magazines and journals such as Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, and the New York Times Magazine. She won various awards for her work at The New York Times. These included two Page One Awards from the Newspaper Guild of New York for a 1973 story entitled "In a Small Town U.S.A., Women's Lib is Either a Joke or a Rarity," and a 1983 profile on tennis celebrity Ivan Lendl. In 1969 she also won a Front Page Award from the Newspaper Women's Club of New York for a story about adoptions by single women. Judy Klemesrud died of cancer in 1985 at the age of forty-six.