13 Facts About Zoe Leonard

Zoe Leonard was born on 1961 and is an American artist who works primarily with photography and sculpture.

Zoe Leonard has exhibited widely since the late 1980s and her work has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions including Documenta IX and Documenta XII, and the 1993,1997 and 2014 Whitney biennials.

Zoe Leonard has stated that her grandmother "was really invested in this idea that we were still aristocracy", although her family was living in poverty in Harlem.

From her earliest aerial photographs to her images of museum displays, anatomical models, and fashion shows, much of Zoe Leonard's work reflects on the framing, classifying, and ordering of vision.

Zoe Leonard was active in AIDS advocacy and queer politics in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, and was a member of ACT UP as well as the Women's Action Coalition.

In 1995 she staged an exhibition at her studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan which featured the work Strange Fruit, an installation of various fruit skins that Zoe Leonard saved and then sewed together by hand with wire and thread.

Zoe Leonard began working on the Fae Richards Photo Archive in 1993 after being approached by director Cheryl Dunye to create a fictive archive of photographs for Dunye's 1996 fictional documentary The Watermelon Woman, in which protagonist Cheryl, played by Dunye, searches for the history of black lesbian entertainer Fae Richards.

The photographs, which Zoe Leonard treated by hand to appear aged, are used as props in the film and were included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial.

Between 1998 and 2009, Zoe Leonard worked on Analogue, a monumental project consisting of an installation of 412 C-prints and gelatin silver prints, and a portfolio of 40 dye-transfer prints.

Zoe Leonard was a member of the jury that selected Cathy Wilkes as recipient of the inaugural Maria Lassnig Prize in 2017.

Zoe Leonard is a founding member of the artist collective, fierce pussy, along with Joy Episalla, Carrie Yamaoka, and Nancy Brooks Brody.

Zoe Leonard has taught at Bard College, and served as the co-chair of the photography department for the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts from 2011 to 2015.

Zoe Leonard was awarded the Bucksbaum Prize in 2014 from the Whitney Museum and the Anonymous was a Woman Award in 2005.