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. Though she has produced over fifty major video works, CONCEIVING ADA is her first feature film.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. She has completed 52 films and videotapes and is at work on an international diary project entitled "Navigating The Millennium, Stories From the Edge of the Century," scheduled to be completed with ZDF/ARTE in the Fall of 1998.
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."
She is currently completing a commission for an interactive installation featuring museum visitor-replicating avatars, that have a life cycle all their own, within a multi-user environment. This telerobotic sculpture is entitled "Difference Engine #3" and will be unveiled in the ZKM Media Museum in February of 1998.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is a Professor of Art 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.
