American artist Lynn Hershman Leeson (b.1941) has been doing artistic practice for more than 50 years and internationally acclaimed for her art and films. As one of the earliest new media vanguard artists, Lynn Hershman Leeson is widely recognised for her innovative work investigating issues that are now recognised as key to the workings of society: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Over the decades, she has made pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, performance, installation and interactive as well as net-based media art.
Read MoreLynn Hershman Leeson is a recipient of a Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award, Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2017 she received a USA Artist Fellowship, the San Francisco Film Society's 'Persistence of Vision' Award and will receive the College Art Association's Lifetime Achievement Award.
Her five feature films - Strange Culture, Teknolust, Conceiving Ada, !Women Art Revolution: A Secret History, and Tania Libre are all in worldwide distribution and have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival and The Berlin International Film Festival, among others. She was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Prize for writing and directing Teknolust. !Women Art Revolution received the Grand Prize Festival of Films on Art.
Her recent solo exhibitions include: Art in Motion. 100 Masterpieces with and through Media, ZKM | Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany (14 July 2018–24 February 2019); Screening of Conceiving Ada & Vertighost at Art Basel, Art Basel Film Programme, Basel, Switzerland (14 June 2018); Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Riga, Latvia (2 June–28 October 2018); Lynn Hershman Leeson: Anti-Bodies, House of Electronic Arts Basel (HeK Basel), Basel, Switzerland (3 May–5 August 2018); Objects Like Us, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Berlin, Germany (20 May 2017–13 January 2019); Flashes of the Future, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (20 April–19 August 2018); Screening of Tania Libre at EPOS Art Film Festival, Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv, Israel (14–17 March 2018).
Her work has been shown in over 200 large-scale exhibitions throughout the world and is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, U.S.A), Tate Modern (London, U.K.), Lehmbruck Museum (Duisberg, Germany), Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art (California, U.S.A), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, Canada), Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis, U.S.A), Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester, U.K.), ZKM | Centre for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany), Berkeley Art Museum (California, U.S.A).
Text courtesy ShanghART.