Lynn Hershman Leeson

Artist and Filmmaker
Professor Emerita, University of California, Davis

!WOMEN ART REVOLUTION + THE INFINITY ENGINE discourse
FRIDAY, APRIL 15 • 6:30-8:45p

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 2004, she was named “the most influential woman working in New Media.” A major survey of her work was presented in 2012 at Kunsthalle Bremen. Her work is featured in “A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance” at the Tate Modern London in 2012 and a retrospective and catalogue are being planned for 2015 at the Zentrum fur Kunst Und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Germany.

Lynn Hershman Leeson released the ground-breaking documentary !Women Art Revolution in 2011 (Zeitgeist Films). It has been screened at major museums internationally and named by the Museum of Modern Art as one of the three best documentaries of the year. She wrote, directed, produced and edited the feature films Strange Culture (New Films/Docurama, 2007), Teknolust (Think Film, 2002/MicroCinema, 2010), and Conceiving Ada (Fox Lorber, 1997/Microcinema, 2010). All featured Tilda Swinton and were showcased at the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival before being distributed internationally.

She has been honored with grants from Creative Capital, The National Endowment for the Arts, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Siemens International Media Arts Award, Lifetime Achievement from Siggraph, Prix Ars Electronica, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Prize for Writing and Directing. The Digital Art Museum in Berlin recognized her work with the d.velop digital art award (d.daa), for Lifetime Achievement in the field of New Media.

Lynn Hershman Leeson received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Her working archive was acquired by Stanford University Special Collections Libraries. Her work is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, William Lehmbruck Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Canada, Walker Art Center, The Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester) and the University Art Museum (UC Berkeley), in addition to celebrated private collections.