Please note date change: this event, originally scheduled for February 28, has been moved to March 21.

Artist and filmmaker Lynn 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 art, as well as net-based media art.

Hershman Leeson is a recipient of a Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award, Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, Guggenheim Fellowship, USA Artist Fellowship, the San Francisco Film Society’s Persistence of Vision Award, and 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, have screened at major film festivals and are all in worldwide distribution. 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. Artworks by Hershman Leeson are featured in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in addition to many celebrated private collections. In 2014 ZKM mounted the first comprehensive retrospective of her work. She is represented by Bridget Donahue, New York, and Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco.

Hershman Leeson is professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and served as chair of the film department at the San Francisco Art Institute.