Zoe Leonard

Adjunct Instructor

Zoe Leonard (born 1961) is an artist working with photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation. Leonard questions how photography shapes our perceptions and reframes the act of looking itself as a complex and consequential process. Taking a conceptual approach and engaging with materiality and formal composition, Leonard works across a range of themes such as gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, and displacement. Her work invites us to contemplate the ways photography can be used to construct both public and private narratives and histories. In recent years, her work has focused on photography’s roles in claiming territory and building nationalist narratives about land, possession, identity, and belonging. To quote the artist; “I am considering how photography can chart a new path of counter-narratives and liberatory gestures of un-building, re-thinking, and re-making how we see and engage with land, history, and each other.”

Leonard has exhibited widely since the early 1990s. Her recent work Al río / to the River is on view at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas through June 2025. A retrospective exhibition was presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2018. Other solo exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, NY, Museo Reina Sofia, Kunsthalle Basel, and Vienna Secession. Leonard has participated in international group shows such as the Carnegie International in 2018, Documenta 9, Documenta 12, and Whitney Biennials in 1993, 1997 and 2014.

Leonard has been the recipient of awards and grants such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, Graham Foundation Grant, the Bucksbaum Award, Anonymous was a Woman Award, and Creative Capital Grant. Leonard taught at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College where she served as Co-Chair of Photography from 2011-2015. She is a founding member of the queer artist collective fierce pussy which has been active since 1991.

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