Imaging Actors

Lynn Hershman Leeson

One of the most influential media artists, 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 as well as net-based media art. Leeson is a recipient of a Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award, Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica,  and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.  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 Berlin International Film Festival, among others.

Stacey Steers

Stacey Steers is known for her process-driven, labor-intensive animated films composed of thousands of handmade works on paper. Her recent work employs images appropriated from early cinematic sources, from which she constructs original, experimental narratives.

Steers’ animated short films have screened widely throughout the U.S. and abroad and have received numerous awards. Her films have been included in many festivals, such as Sundance and Telluride, and screened at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), and MoMA. She was the focus of a major retrospective at the 2015 Annecy Festival of Animation in Annecy France and received the Brakhage Vision Award at the 2012 Denver International Film Festival.

Recently, Steers has expanded her work to include collaborative installations that join invented, three-dimensional production elements with film loops, creating new context for experiencing her films. Steers’ installation work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery (Washington, D.C.), the Denver Art Museum, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, among other venues and has been collected widely.