Jacob Gils was born in Gentofte, Denmark, in an artist family. His mother is the painter Merete Hansen and his father was the painter Ove Gils. Jacob Gils graduated from the Copenhagen School of Photography in 1989, where he assisted the Danish photographer Leif Schiller. In his early career he worked as an advertising photographer and founded the renowned photo studio Gils Photography. In 2001 he switched to an art practice and began to experiment with various techniques and forms of expression in photography.