Andrew Robison studied at Princeton University, Oxford University, and as a Fulbright Research Scholar in India. From 1970 through 1973, he taught philosophy at the University of Illinois. He joined the curatorial staff of the National Gallery of Art in 1974, becoming Senior Curator in 1983 and Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator in 1991.

Over four decades Robison has curated dozens of exhibitions on art from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries, especially on drawings and prints by early German artists, Rembrandt, eighteenth-century Venetian artists, German expressionists and Pablo Picasso, as well as the multi-media exhibitions, Art for the Nation: Gifts in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, (1991), The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century (1994–1995), and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: 1880–1938 (2003).

Robison is widely published in professional journals such as Master Drawings and Apollo. He has contributed to and edited numerous exhibition catalogues including Paper in Prints (1977), Master Drawings from the Collection of the National Gallery of Art and Promised Gifts (1978), Etchings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi: the Early Architectural Fantasies (1978), German Expressionist Prints From the Collection of Ruth and Jacob Kainen (l985), Master Drawings from the Armand Hammer Collection (l987 and l989), Dürer to Diebenkorn: Recent Acquisitions of Art on Paper (l992), Building a Collection (1997), German Master Drawings from the Wolfgang Ratjen Collection (2010), and with Judith Brodie, A Century of Drawing: Works on Paper from Degas to LeWiit (2001-2002), and with Elizabeth Prelinger, Edvard Munch: Master Prints (2010). Robison is the author of the book, Piranesi: Early Architectural Fantasies: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Etchings (1986).