Lynn Hershman Leeson is perhaps the most influential woman working in new media today. Her work in photography, video, installation, interactive and net-based media have all been recognized with much acclaim. Her 53 videotapes and 7 interactive installations have garnered many international awards, including First Prize Vigo, Spain and First Prize Crystal Trophy, Montbelliard, France. In 2005 she received the Award for Positive Innovations in Media from the International Digital Media and Arts Association. Additionally she holds the 1999 Golden Nica from Ars Electronica.

Her most recent film, Strange Culture (2007), has opened to wide acclaim at festivals around the world, proclaimed as one of the most politically important documentaries of recent years. The film portrays the Kafkaesque nightmare experienced by internationally-acclaimed artist and professor Steve Kurtz after his wife Hope died in her sleep of heart failure. Police who responded to Kurtz’s 911 call deemed Kurtz’s art suspicious and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was detained as a suspected "bioterrorist," and even today he and his long-time collaborator Dr. Robert Ferrell await a trial date. Strange Culture will be screened as part of the keynote presentation.

In Fall of 2005, The University of California Press published a monograph, Secret Agents Private I, The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson. In conjunction, a touring retrospective of her work opened in November 2005 organized by the Henry Gallery in Seattle. Also in 2005 Hershman Leeson completed a new media commission for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a public art commission for Charles Schwab.

In 2004 Stanford University Libraries honored Hershman Leeson by acquired 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.

Hershman Leeson was the first woman to receive a tribute and retrospective at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1994, and she was awarded the ZKM/Seimens Media Arts Award. In 1998, she was a Sundance Screenwriter Fellow and was honored with the Flintridge Foundation Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts.

The 2003 Alfred P. Sloan Award for writing and directing was awarded to Hershman Leeson for Teknolust, starring Tilda Swinton and Jeremy Davies, which premiered in the American Showcase of the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. Lynn Hershman Leeson‘s first feature film, Conceiving Ada, was shown at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, The Toronto International Film Festival, The Berlin International Film Festival and 35 other festivals worldwide. It also received the award of "Outstanding Achievement in Drama" from the Festival of Electronic Cinema.

Conceiving Ada was released by Fox Lorber in February 1999 and on DVD in February 2000.

Lynn Hershman Leeson's artwork is held in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art New York; The National Gallery of Canada; LA County Museum of Art; Seattle Museum; DG Bank, Frankfurt; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The William Lehmbruch Museum, Duisburg; ZKM Center for Art and Media in Germany, The University Art Museum of Berkeley, and the Hess Collection.

Hershman Leeson is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, an A.D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University, and she is currently Chair of the Film Department at San Francisco Art Institute. She is also an alumnus of SFSU, having earned her MFA here.

She lives and works in San Francisco. Lynn's webpage.