Lynn Hershman Leeson
filmmaker, b. 1941.
Lynn Hershman Leeson lives and works in San Francisco, California. Over the last five decades, she has been internationally acclaimed for her art and films, cited as one of the most influential media artists and widely recognized for her innovative work on the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. She has made pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, performance, installation and interactive as well as net-based media art. Her six feature films: Strange Culture , Teknolust, Conceiving Ada , !Women Art Revolution: A Secret History , Tania Libre , and The Electronic Diaries are all in worldwide distribution and have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, and The Berlin International Film Festival, amongst others. She was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Prize for Teknolust and !Women Art Revolution received the Grand Prize Festival of Films on Art.
Hershman Leeson is a recipient of a SIGGRAPH Lifetime Achievement Award, Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. The ZKM Center for Art and Media mounted the first comprehensive retrospective of her work, titled “Civic Radar” in 2014 along with a substantial catalog. 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. In 2022, she was awarded a special mention from the Jury for her participation in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams . In 2023, Pratt Institute of Art in New York awarded her with an Honorary Doctorate. Creative Capital awarded her with their Distinguished Artist Award and SFMOMA acquired the museum’s first NFT from Hershman Leeson in 2023. Work by Hershman Leeson is featured in the public collections of the , New York; The San Francisco ; ZKM Center for Art and Media; the ; Tate Modern, London; The National Gallery of Canada, and the Walker Art Center in addition to many celebrated private collections. The artist is represented by Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York and , San Francisco.
