About Leslie Thornton

ABOUT LESLIE THORNTON

Leslie Thornton has long been considered a pioneer of contemporary media aesthetics, working at the border and limits of cinema, video and digital media. She is known for addressing a range of charged subjects, from Orientalism to the exfoliations of war, and the disposition of non-human species. Such seminal works as the 30 year serial Peggy and Fred in Hell occupy a unique place in cinema history, cited as a masterwork of 20th Century film and video art. She is a contemporary of such fellow explorers as Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Chantal Ackerman and Eve Sussman, all artists who have opened up new spaces for media, re-mapping its boundaries within the museum or gallery space, as well as the public spaces of theater, television and the Internet.

Thornton has received many awards, including the Maya Deren Award, the first Alpert Award in the Arts for media, two Rockefeller Fellowships, and a Guggenheim. The work has been screened and  installed and collected around the world, at venues including dOCUMENTA, MoMA PS1, Centre Pompidou, the Whitney Biennial, the Tate Modern,   Serpentine Gallery in London, Marian Goodman Gallery, and the Rotterdam, Berlin, Buenos Aires and New York Film Festivals, to name but a few. As a long-standing Professor of Film at Brown University, and a visiting teaching fellow at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, Thornton has influenced an entire generation of filmmakers, artists, critics and theorists.