Since the late 60s, conceptual artist Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941 in Cleveland) has constantly been pushing the boundaries in art and continuously explored new territories. She already very early on worked on issues that later were regarded as key issues in contemporary art: Identity and construction of identity, relationship between real and virtual world, relationship between human beings and machines, surveillance of the individual, gender questions.

Lynn Hershman Leeson has been an innovator in the use of various media and playfully discovered various media for her work and is acknowledged as a pioneer in New Media. Consequently, Hershman Leeson has been awarded the ZKM Siemens Media Art Price in 1995 and the d.velop digital art award (ddaa) for her lifetime achievement in Digital Art in 2010. In 2014, a major retrospective exhibition opened at ZKM in Karlsruhe and traveled to Harald Falckenberg Collection/Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2015) and to Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg (2016). A vanguard exhibition on art and biotechnology was opened in 2018 in Basel at the HeK and for 2021 a solo show at the New Museum in New York is scheduled.

Lynn Hershman Leeson is also a filmmaker and created four feature films, all of them having been shown at international film festivals as Berlinale, Sundance etc. In three of them, Tilda Swinton played the main role. In 2010, Lynn Hershman Leeson finished “Women Art Revolution”, a documentary film she has been working on for several decades. Women Art Revolution documents the emancipation of women in the art world in the United States. The film has been shown at Sundance Film Festival, the Toronto Film Festival, the Berlinale, at the MOMA in NY and many other venues.

Hershman Leeson’s work is, amongst others, in the collections of  the MOMA in New York and the MOMA in San Francisco, the Tate Modern in London, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Donald Hess Collection, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Walker Art Center, and the Berkeley Art Museum.

Biography