Born: Chicago, IL, 1939 Education: Bachelor of Art, 1962 - University of California, Los Angeles, CA Member, Phi Beta Kappa Masters of Art, 1964 - University of California, Los Angeles, CA Honorary Degrees Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, 1992 - Russell Sage College, Troy, NY Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, 2000 - Smith College, Northampton, MA Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters, 2000 - Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual whose career now spans four decades. Her influence, attested to in hundreds of publications, has produced a major impact both within and beyond the art community. Her art has been exhibited throughout the United States and in Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Most of the books she has authored have been published in foreign editions, taking her art and philosophy to readers worldwide. In the early seventies after a decade of professional art practice, Chicago pioneered feminist art and art education through a unique program for women at California State University, Fresno. She then brought her program to the California Institute of the Arts where, with artist Miriam Schapiro, she established the Feminist Art Program which produced the famous Womanhouse, the first installation demonstrating an openly female point of view in art. The ongoing impact of Chicago's work and ideas have helped to initiate a worldwide feminist art movement. In 1974 Chicago turned her attention to the subject of women's history to create her most well- known work, The Dinner Party, executed between 1974 and 1979 with the participation of hundreds of volunteers. This monumental multimedia project, a symbolic history of women in Western Civilization, was seen by more than one million viewers during its fifteen exhibitions held at venues spanning six countries. The importance of The Dinner Party, along with Chicago's role as the founder of the feminist art movement, was examined in the 1996 exhibition, Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History. Curated by Dr. Amelia Jones at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, this show was accompanied by an extensive catalog published by the University of California Press. In the fall of 2002, The Dinner Party will be exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in the same space it occupied in its 1980 showing. In 2004 the Brooklyn Museum will be the site of The Dinner Party's permanent housing as the centerpiece of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. From 1980 to1985, Chicago worked on the Birth Project. Having observed an absence of iconography about the subject of birth in Western art, Chicago designed a monumental series of birth and creation images for needlework which were executed under her supervision by skilled needleartists around the country. The Birth Project, exhibited in more than 100 venues, employed the collaborative methods and a similar merging of concept and media that characterized The Dinner Party. Exhibition units from the Birth Project can be seen in numerous public collections around the country including the Albuquerque Museum where the core collection of the Birth Project has been placed to be conserved and made available for exhibition and study. While completing the Birth Project, Chicago also focused on individual studio work to create Powerplay. In this unusual series of drawings, paintings, weavings, cast paper, and bronze reliefs, Chicago brought a critical feminist gaze to the gender construct of masculinity, exploring how prevailing definitions of power have affected the world in general - and men in particular. The thought processes involved in Powerplay, the artist's long concern with issues of power and powerlessness, and a growing interest in her Jewish heritage led Chicago to her next body of art. The Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light, premiered in October, 1993 at the Spertus Museum in Chicago, continues to travel to museums around the United States. The Holocaust Project evolved from eight years of inquiry, travel, study, and artistic creation; it includes a series of images merging Chicago's painting with the photography of Donald Woodman, as well as works in stained glass and tapestry designed by Chicago and executed by skilled artisans. For many decades, Chicago has produced works on paper, both monumental and intimate. These were the subject of an extensive retrospective which opened in early 1999 at the Florida State University Art Museum in Tallahassee, Florida. Organized by Dr. Viki Thompson Wylder, who is a scholar on the subject of Chicago's oeuvre, this was the first comprehensive examination of the body of Chicago's art. Accompanied by a catalog by Dr. Wylder with an introduction by renowned critic, Lucy Lippard, the exhibit, Trials and Tributes will be traveling around the United States through 2002. In the fall of 1999, Chicago returned to teaching for the first time in twenty-five years, having accepted a succession of one-semester appointments at various institutions around the country - beginning with Indiana University where she received a Presidential Appointment in Art and Gender Studies. In 2000, she was an Inter-Institutional Artist in Residence at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 2001, she undertook a project with students at Western Kentucky University commemorating the thirty-year anniversary of Womanhouse. Working with students, faculty, and local artists, Chicago developed a project titled At Home, reexamining the subject of "the house", this time from the perspective of residents of Kentucky who have a keen sense of place and home. Resolutions: A Stitch in Time is Judy Chicago's most recent collaborative project. Begun in 1994 with a number of skilled needleworkers with whom she has worked for many years, Resolutions combines painting and needlework in a series of exquisitely crafted and inspiring images which - with an eye to the future - playfully reinterpret traditional adages and proverbs. The exhibition opened in June, 2000 at the American Craft Museum, New York, NY, and is being toured by them to a number of venues around the United States. In addition to a life of prodigious artmaking, Chicago is the author of seven books: ?Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist, 1975 (subsequently published in England, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan); ?The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage, 1979; ?Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework, 1980 (subsequently published in a combined edition in Germany); ?The Birth Project, 1985 (Anchor/Doubleday); ?Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, 1993; ?The Dinner Party Judy Chicago, 1996; ?Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist, 1996 (Viking Penguin). In 1999, Chicago published a new book coauthored with Edward Lucie-Smith, the well-known British art writer. Published in the U.S., Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany, Women and Art: Contested Territory examines images of women by both male and female artists throughout history. In the spring of 2000, Judy Chicago: An American Vision, a richly illustrated monograph about Chicago's career by Edward Lucie-Smith, was published. This book provides the first comprehensive assessment of Chicago's body of art. Chicago is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Russell Sage College in Troy, NY; an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, honoris causafrom Smith College, Northampton, MA; an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Lehigh University Bethlehem, PA; and the 1999 UCLA Alumni Professional Achievement Award. Many films have been produced about her work including Right Out of History; The Making of Judy Chicago's Dinner Party by Johanna Demetrakas; documentaries on Womanhouse, the Birth Project and The Holocaust Project; and two films produced by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Under Wraps and The Other Side of the Picture. E Entertainment Television included Judy Chicago in its three part program, World's Most Intriguing Women. In 1996, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA, became the repository for Chicago's papers. Chicago is the first living artist to be included in this major archive, one already being used by scholars researching Judy Chicago's work. In October, 2002 at the same time The Dinner Party is on display in Brooklyn and other projects continue to travel, a major exhibition surveying Chicago's career is scheduled at The National Museum of Women in the Arts. The show will be accompanied by a catalog edited by Dr. Elizabeth A. Sackler; it contains essays by Lucy Lippard and Dr. Viki Thompson Wylder and an Introduction by Edward Lucie-Smith. For nearly four decades, Chicago has remained steadfast in her commitment to the power of art as a vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change and to women's right to engage in the highest level of art production. As a result, she has become a symbol for people everywhere, known and respected as an artist, writer, teacher, and humanist whose work and life are models for an enlarged definition of art, an expanded role for the artist, and women's right to freedom of expression.