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Obtained from the website: www.temple.edu/photo/photographers/cindy/sherman.htm Cindy Sherman (1954- ) "Cindy Sherman was born on January 19, 1954 in Glen Ridge, N.J. She attended State University College at Buffalo, N.Y., majored in art, and received a bachelor's degree in 1976. The following year she moved to New York City. In 1981, Sherman had her first one-person exhibition, which made rounds through New York, Chicago and Genoa, Italy. She began her career at a time when the art world was just beginning to focus on the relationship between the existence of a mass media society and how the implements of this society --television, film, and photography, among others-- could be used to further reinforce and redefine the icons and the rites of this rapidly expanding popular culture. In this context, Sherman was able to achieve almost instantaneous success, though some critics doubted whether her work was the result of insight into the media mind, or simply, constant unquestioning exposure to the same forces and stereotypes that she sought to critique. As more and more artists turned to the media as the subject of their artistic expression, as an unprecedented number of them did during the 1980s, Sherman expanded her work beyond her recreation of "film stills", and used her technique of photographic parody to comment on other vehicles of gender stereotype: the magazine centerfold, the fashion spread, advertising, children's literature, formal portraiture, historical records, and, most recently, mannequins. Over the short breadth of her career, her work has grown markedly more aggressive in tone, and more overt in its message. Nevertheless, Sherman continues to carefully conceal her own identity in her work, despite the fact that she uses herself as a model in the bulk of her photographs. All but her mannequin and bodily fluid photographs are self-portraits. As she has grown more pronounced in her mockery and condemnation of what Sherman biographer Rosalind Krauss describes as the "erotic fetish that clouds every media image of the female", feminists have attacked Sherman for her refusal to break her silence. Sherman has never commented on any of her pieces through the use of a title. She seldom consents to interviews and even more infrequently allows herself to be photographed out of character. As author Rosalind Krauss wrote in her volume, Cindy Sherman 1975-1993, "Sherman, the de-myth-ifer, is reconsumed as myth." Essayist Norman Bryson summarizes Sherman's career to date in a slightly different manner. He views her work as maturing not so much in its attitude toward gender and feminism, but in its outlook on life in general. He urges the viewer to compare Sherman's film stills to her fairy tale disasters, series on bodily fluids and tissues, or mannequin arrangements. Her work, he argues, has not grown into a commentary, it has simply departed from capturing the ideal. With many others attempting to dissect the media myth, Sherman, he feels, has taken on a larger task: breaking down reality to see if anything remains: to see if there is such a thing as a core identity, or if there is nothing but myth, or what we choose to dress ourselves up to be. In 1996, Sherman produced a film, Office Killer, in which a secretary exacts her revenge for corporate downsizing. In 1999 she was named one of the Top 10 Living Artists by ARTnews magazine. Her work has been shown in more than 75 solo exhibitions and as part of over 150 group exhibitions. Sixty-four museums collect her prints."