Leo Yankevich grew up and attended high school in Farrell, Pennsylvania, a small steel town in western Pennsylvania. He studied History and Polish Studies at Alliance College, Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, receiving a BA in 1984. Later that year he traveled to Poland on a fellowship from the Kosciuszko Foundation to attend Krakow's Jagiellonian University. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, he decided to settle permanently in Poland. Thereafter, he lived in Gliwice, an industrial city in Upper Silesia.