Lynn Herschman Leeson

Join the Hunter Moving Image Alliance for a conversation with the artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson.

Over the last five decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her art and films. One of the most influential media artists, Hershman Leeson is widely recognized for her innovative work investigating issues that are now recognized 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 last 40 years she has made pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, performance, installation and interactive as well as net-based media art.

In 2021, Hershman Leeson's first solo museum exhibition opened in NYC at the New Museum with a new commission that purified water. Other recent exhibition have included the 2020 Gwangju Biennial, the Sharja Biennial, Art of Anxiety, Uncanny Calley at the de Young Museum, and the one-person exhibition titled Lynn Hershman Leeson Antibodies at H+K Basel. The Catalogue Lynn Hershman Leeson Antibodies was named one of the best art books of 2019 by The New York Times and Art News. In ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, mounted the first comprehensive retrospective titled Civic Radar curated by Peter Weibel and Andreas Beitin. Its catalogue was named one of “10 indispensable art books of 2016”.

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. Art work by Lynn Hershman Leeson is in The Museum of Modern Art, the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, SF MOMA, The Tate Modern, The National Gallery of Canada, and the Walker Art Center in addition to many celebrated private collections. In 2004 Stanford University Libraries acquired Hershman Leeson’s working archive. Hershman Leeson is Professor Emeritus at U.C. Davis, served as Chair of the film Department at San Francisco Art Institute.