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A Talk with Lynn Hershman Leeson

Wed Mar 21, 2018 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Lynn Hershman Leeson is a Bay Area feminist artist, video/filmmaker and pioneering digital media artist. Over the last four 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 forty 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 2014m ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, mounted the first comprehensive retrospective of her work titled Civic Radar curated by Peter Weibel and Andreas Beitin. A substantial publication, which Holland Cotter listed as one of the “10 indispensible art books of 2016”.

Lynn 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 and have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival and The Berlin International Film Festival, among others. She was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Prize for writing and directing Teknolust. !Women Art Revolution received the Grand Prize Festival of Films on Art.

Art work by Lynn Hershman Leeson is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The SF MOMA, The Tate Modern, The National Gallery of Canada, and the Walker Art Center in addition to many celebrated private collections. Currently her work is on view at “Being Modern’, From the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art “at the Louis Vuitton Foundation Center in Paris, Future Shock, Site Santa Fe, and will be in the ICA Boston exhibition “Art and the Internet” which features in its catalogue a conversation between Hershman and Hito Steyerl.

A new commission, a film and 3D installation titled Vertighost will open at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco December 2017. She is represented by Bridget Donahue New York and Anglim Gilbert Gallery San Francisco. In 2004 Stanford University Libraries acquired Hershman Leeson’s working archive. Secret Agents Private I, The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson was published by The University of California Press. Hershman Leeson is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, served as Chair of the film Department at San Francisco Art Institute.