Video History Project

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Lynn Hershman Leeson

Lynn Hershman Leeson is an artist who works with many media, including photography and installations. A consistent theme in her work is how people engage media-derived fantasies. In 1989, her feature length video, "Longshot," won the Grand Prize at the Montbelliard Festival in France, and the Montreal Video Festival.

Another work, Seeing Is Believing, won the First Prize in 1991 at Vigo, Spain. Her ongoing electronic diary, First Person Plural, has won numerous awards worldwide and screened most recently at the 1996 Berlin Film Festival. In 1995, she was the first woman to receive both a Tribute and a Retrospective at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

In 1994, she was awarded (with director Peter Greenaway and theorist Jean Baudrillard) the prestigious Siemens Media Prize by the ZKM, which cited her as being the "most influential woman working in new media." Lynn Hershman Leeson is a Professor in the Program in Technocultural Studies at the University of California, Davis, and is the author of Clicking In, Hotlinks to a Digital Culture, published by Bay Press. She has had over 200 exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the world.

In the late 1970s she pioneered the use of interactive artworks with her innovative art disk Lorna. Her artwork is included in such collections as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Seattle Art Museum, The D.G. Bank, Frankfurt, The Hess Collection, and the Walker Art Center. She has had retrospectives at The National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Warsaw. https://www.lynnhershman.com/

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"Lynn Hershman Leeson." Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2011. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/lynn-hershman-leeson.

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Summary

Lynn Hershman Leeson is an artist working in photography, installation and electronic media; her work examines how people engage media-derived fantasies. Longshot won Grand Prizes at the 1989 Montbelliard Festival (France) and the Montreal Video Festival, and Seeing Is Believing won First Prize at Vigo in 1991; her electronic diary First Person Plural screened at the 1996 Berlin Film Festival and has won numerous awards. She received the 1994 Siemens Media Prize from ZKM (shared with Peter Greenaway and Jean Baudrillard), was the first woman to receive both a Tribute and Retrospective at the 1995 San Francisco International Film Festival, is Professor in UC Davis's Program in Technocultural Studies, authored Clicking In, and has had over 200 exhibitions with work held by MoMA New York and other collections; website http://www.lynnhershman.com/.

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Last modified 18 June 2011

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