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 a era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. In December 2014 a major retrospective of her work titled CiviC RadaR will open at the ZKM (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe Germany. In 2011 Lynn Hershman Leeson released the ground-breaking documentary Women Art Revolution. Forty-two years in the making, W.A.R. charts the history of the Feminist Art Movement in America from the 1960s to the present and deftly illuminates how this underexplored movement radically transformed the art and culture of our times. Making its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010, the film is distributed by Zeitgeist Films and has since been screened at major museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Migros Museum, Zurich; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. In 2012, a survey of her work was presented at Kunsthalle Bremen, and she was featured in “A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance” at the Tate Modern London.Hershman Leeson’s work is also part of the touring ICI exhibition State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, curated by Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss; and was featured at the Museum of Modern Art recently in XL: 19 New Acquisitions in Photography. It is also part of public collections of at the William Lehmbruck Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Canada, Walker Art Center, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and the University Art Museum, Berkeley, in addition to the celebrated private collections of Donald Hess and Arturo Schwarz, among many others. Recently honored with grants from the Tides Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, she is also the recipient of a Siemens International media Arts Award, the Flintridge Foundation Award for Lifetime Achievement in the visuals, Prix Ars Electronica, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and SIGGRAPH Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2010 the Digital Art Museum in Berlin recognized her work with the d.velop digital art award (d.daa), the most distinguished honor for lifetime achievement in the field of new media. In 2004 Hershman Leeson’s working archive was acquired by Stanford University Libraries. Hershman Leeson was recently recognized by The New School in New York as a Dorothy H. Hirshon Director in Residence, for the 2013-14 academic year in the School of media Studies. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis and was previously Chair of the Film Department at San Francisco Art Institute.


Portrait photo courtesy the artist.