Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Video, film, installation, performance, photography, net art, AI
Website: lynnhershman.com
Lynn Hershman Leeson was born in 1941 in Cleveland, Ohio, and has lived and worked in San Francisco for most of her adult life. She received a BA from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1963 and an MFA from San Francisco State University in 1972. She taught in the Art Studio program at UC Davis from 1993 to 2004 and is now Professor Emerita there; she was also Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007 and a Distinguished Professor at Large at Cornell University. She is represented by Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco and Bridget Donahue Gallery in New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, LACMA, the National Gallery of Canada, ZKM, the Tate, and many others. Her archive is held at Stanford University Libraries alongside those of Jim Goldberg, Catherine Wagner, and Allen Ginsberg — a fellow wiki artist in each of the first two cases.
Her awards span six decades: the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica (1999), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Prize (2002), the Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award (2009), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), the College Art Association Lifetime Achievement Award (2017), the United States Artists Fellowship (2016), Creative Capital’s Distinguished Artist Award (2023), and an Honorary Doctorate from Pratt Institute (2023). In 2022, SFMOMA acquired the museum’s first NFT — from Hershman Leeson. Her six feature films — Strange Culture, Teknolust, Conceiving Ada, !Women Art Revolution: A Secret History, Tania Libre, and The Electronic Diaries — are in worldwide distribution and have screened at Sundance, Toronto, and the Berlin International Film Festival.
Hershman Leeson has worked prolifically since the 1960s across sculpture, film, video, installation, performance, drawing, painting, net art, and experiments with interactive technologies, investigating identity, surveillance, feminism, and the relationship between humans and technology. She was the first artist to use an interactive Videodisc (her work Lorna, 1983–84), the first to incorporate a touch screen interface into an artwork (Deep Contact, 1984–89), and one of the earliest artists to work with networked robotic systems and artificial intelligence. Her most sustained early project was Roberta Breitmore (1974–78), in which she developed a fictional alter ego — complete with a driver’s license, credit cards, dental X-rays, and a psychiatrist — that existed fully in the physical world for four years, probing the constructed nature of identity a decade before postmodern theory articulated the same ideas. Her recent practice has centered on AI and biotechnology, including the Infinity Engine (2014–ongoing), a meditation on genetic engineering and human modification, and her current preoccupation with immortality through the lens of digital consciousness.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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