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Lynn Hershman Leeson is an American artist and filmmaker. She was Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She is Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute.

From 1973-79 she made a pioneering work, "Roberta Breitmore". In this piece she lived as another identity who was created out of artifacts of that time frame.

More recently, she has made feature films such as Conceiving Ada (1997). Her film Teknolust (2002) received the Alfred P. Sloan Award . [1] Her most recent film, Strange Culture was the story of Steve Kurtz. The film was simultaneously screened at Sundance and webcast to Second Life on January 22nd 2007 and has subsequently opened the Panorama Section of the Berlinale, and the Human Rights Watch Festival at Lincoln Center, and has played in numerous festivals including Locarno and Edinburgh. It will play at New York Museum of Modern Art and then open theatrically, going to DVD and playing on the Sundance Channel in December. It is being distributed worldwide by Cinemavault Releasing.

In 2000, Lynn Hershman Leeson received funding from the Daniel Langlois Foundation to produce Agent Ruby (2002) ^[1], and in 2006 she received another grant from the Foundation to produce Life to the Second Power: Animating the Archive (2006) ^[2].

In 2004 Stanford University Libraries honored Hershman Leeson by acquiring her entire working archive from 1966 to 2002. The archive contains material related to all stages of her completed projects since the early 1970s, including preliminary conceptual research and drawings, technical specifications, media, correspondence, and photographs.

In the fall of 2005, the University of California Press published a monograph, Secret Agents Private I, The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson.

In 1995, she received the Siemens-Medienkunstpreis award from the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany, a prize also presented that year to Jean Baudrillard, Peter Greenaway, and Steina and Woody Vasulka. In 1998, the Flintridge Foundation awarded her a prize honouring her whole career in visual arts. In 1999, she received the Golden Nica Prize at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria ^[3].

Stiles, Kristine.“1.1.78 - 2.2.78: Roberta Breitmore,” Roberta Breitmore Is Not Lynn Hershman (San Francisco: De Young Memorial Museum, 1978): 5-14.

• Lynn Hershman Leeson Home page
• Lynn Hershman is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim
• Hershman is also represented by bitforms gallery
• Agent Ruby web site
• Lynn Hershman Leeson at the Internet Movie Database
• Selected awards (PDF)
• Selected exhibition history (PDF)
• Selected film and video history (PDF)
• Selected publications (PDF)
• The Presence Project | Lynn Hershman Leeson [2]