Biography
Born 1941
Lives and works in San Francisco, CA
Lynn Hershman Leeson is the recipient of the 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and award that celebrates her forthcoming documentary, !Women Art Revolution! A (Formerly) Secret History. She is presently in the editing phase of this feature-length film, which is anticipated for release in 2010.
Over the last three decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her pioneering use of new technologies and her investigations of issues that are now recognized as key to the working of our society: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in an era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds.
In 2007 a retrospective at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, Autonomous Agents, featured a comprehensive range of the artist’s work – from the Roberta Breitmore series (1974-78) to videos from the 1980s and interactive installations that use the Internet and artificial intelligence software. Her influential early ventures into performance and photography are also featured in the current touring exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I, was published by The University of California Press in 2005 on the occasion of another retrospective at the Henry Gallery in Seattle. Her three feature films - Strange Culture, Teknolust, Conceiving Ada – have been part of the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival, among others, and have won numerous awards.
Work by Lynn Hershman Leeson is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the William Lehmbruck Museum, the ZKM (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Walker Art Center and the University Art Museum, Berkeley, in addition to the celebrated private collections of Donald Hess and Arturo Schwarz, among many others. Commissions include projects for the Tate Modern, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, de Young Museum, Daniel Langlois and Stanford University, and Charles Schwab.
Recently honored with grants from Creative Capital and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is also the recipient of a Siemens International Media Arts Award, the Flintridge Foundation Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts, Prix Ars Electronica, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize, and the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art from the Association for Computer Graphic’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH). In 2004, Stanford University Libraries acquired Hershman Leeson’s working archive.
Hershman Leeson is Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis and an A D White Professor at Large at Cornell University.