Miro Švolík was born in Zlaté Moravce, Slovakia, in 1960. He lives in Prague, Czech Republic. He graduated from the School for Applied Arts in Bratislava in 1979 where he studied applied photography. In 1987, he graduated from the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU), Prague, and from that time has worked as a freelance art photographer.

Since 2009, Švolík has been the head of the Department of Photography and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (VŠVU) in Bratislava, Slovakia.  In 1990, he was given the Young Photographer Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, NY.  Since 1984, Švolík has had 70 solo exhibitions and participated in approximately 200 group shows. He has exhibited his photographs in various European countries and several times in the U.S.

Švolík was featured in FotoFest 1990 - Perspectives, Real and Imaginary: Nineteen Contemporary Czechoslovak Photographers curated by Wendy Watriss and Frederic C. Baldwin, in FotoFest 1998 - Altered Worlds: Contemporary Slovak Staged Photography, and in the 2011 show A Matter of Wit curated by Wendy Watriss. 

In 2005, Švolík published The Way to the Centre, a book of black and white film photographs. His digital photographs were published in 2010 in a catalog from his show in Bratislava titled Big Woman Little Man.  Švolík’s photographs are represented in major collections, including MOMA New York, Art Institute Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.