Lorna Simpson was born in New York City where she earned her BFA from the School for the Visual Arts in 1983 and continues to live and work. She graduated with an MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1985 and quickly became a leading conceptual photographer, known for questioning the objectivity of the medium and using it to provoke reflection on the historical depersonalization and sexualization of black women and men. Simpson was the first black woman exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and has had solo exhibitions at museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Haus der Kunst, Munich.
“There is a strong desire to assign a personal, biographical narrative to photography. . . . the assumption that the narrative is about a singular individual and a singular experience, and I try to pull it out of that. . . . This is a figure that is representative and not specific, and therefore not me. . . . I wanted to keep alive in the work the shifting of the meaning before you—not something packaged and re-formed.”