Actor: Lynn Hershman-Leeson

Born in: Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Biography: Over the last five decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has received international acclaim for her art and films. She is 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. She is considered one of the most influential media artists and has made pioneering contributions in photography, video, film, performance, installation and interactive as well as net-based media art. Her activist films on injustice within the art world and society at large have been praised worldwide. !Women Art Revolution! won first prize in the Montreal Festival for Films on Art and hailed by the Museum of Modern Art as one of the three best documentaries of 2012. Holland Cotter of the New York Times called it “the most comprehensive documentary ever made on the feminist art movement.” Her 2009 film Strange Culture – which the NY Time deemed “the perfect balance of form and content” and The Nation called “a brilliant and moving examination of fear and its manipulation” – resulted in the the release of an artist facing a prison sentence of 23 years.