Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954)[2] is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.

Though Sherman had failed a required photography class as a freshman, she repeated the course with Barbara Jo Revelle, whom she credited with introducing her to conceptual art and other contemporary forms.

[9] In 1974, together with Longo, Charles Clough and Nancy Dwyer, she created Hallwalls, an arts center intended as a space that would accommodate artists from diverse backgrounds.

To create her photographs, Sherman shoots alone in her studio, assuming multiple roles as author, director, make-up artist, hairstylist, wardrobe mistress, and model.

Sherman used costumes and make-up, including blackface, to transform her identity for each image, and the cutout characters were lined up along the bus's advertising strip.

Some critiques say that this work showed insensitivity to race through the use of blackface makeup[20][21] while others state that it was rather with the intention of exposing racism embedded in society.

Many of Sherman's photo series, like the 1981 Centerfolds, call attention to stereotypes of women in society, films, television and magazines.

The series Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), with which Cindy Sherman achieved international recognition, consists of 69 black-and-white photographs.

The artist poses in different roles (librarians, hillbillies, and seductresses), and settings (streets, yards, pools, beaches, and interiors),[25] producing a result reminiscent of stills typical of Italian neorealism or American film noir of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

An overarching characteristic of her heroines were those that did not follow conventional ideas of marriage and family; they were rebellious women who either died as that or who were later tamed by society.

The Untitled Film Stills fall into several distinct groups: The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan purchased the series for an estimated $1 million in 1995.

[34] In addition to her film stills, Sherman has appropriated a number of other visual forms—the centerfold, fashion photograph, historical portrait, and soft-core sex image.

The twelve (24 by 48 inches) photographs were initially commissioned — but not used — by Artforum's Editor in Chief Ingrid Sischy for an artist's section in the magazine.

"[42] Reviewer Jerry Saltz told New York magazine that Sherman's work is "[f]ashioned from dismembered and recombined mannequins, some adorned with pubic hair, one posed with a tampon in vagina, another with sausages being excreted from vulva, this was anti-porn porn, the unsexiest sex pictures ever made, visions of feigning, fighting, perversion.

Between 2003 and 2004, Sherman produced the Clowns cycle, where the use of digital photography enabled her to create chromatically garish backdrops and montages of numerous characters.

Set against opulent backdrops and presented in ornate frames, the characters in Sherman's 2008 untitled Society Portraits are not based on specific women, but the artist has made them look entirely familiar in their struggle with the standards of beauty that prevail in a youth- and status-obsessed culture.

[49] Based on a 32-page insert[50] Sherman did for POP using vintage clothes from Chanel’s archive, a more recent series of large-scale pictures from 2012 depict outsized enigmatic female figures standing in striking isolation before ominous painterly landscapes the artist had photographed in Iceland during the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull and on the isle of Capri.

[62] In the early 1990s, Sherman worked with Minneapolis band Babes in Toyland, providing photographs for covers for the albums Fontanelle and Painkillers, creating a stage backdrop used in live concerts, and acting in the promotional video for the song "Bruise Violet.

Sherman moved from photographs to film with her movie Office Killer in 1997, starring Jeanne Tripplehorn, Molly Ringwald and Carol Kane.

In a review for The New York Times, art critic Roberta Smith states that the film lacks the artist's usual finesse and is a retrospective of her work - "a fascinating if lumpish bit of Shermaniana.

"[66] Later, she had a cameo role in John Waters' film Pecker, and also appeared in The Feature in 2008, starring ex-husband Michel Auder, which won a New Vision Award.

[citation needed] Echoing similar grisly and gory elements as her Untitled Horror series, the film includes several artistically executed murder scenes.

[citation needed] Sherman has since participated in many international events,[72] including SITE Santa Fe (2004);[73] the Venice Biennale (1982, 1995);[74] and five Whitney Biennials.

[89] In 2016, after a sabbatical from her studio which was spent "coming to terms with health issues and getting older," Sherman produced and staged her first photo gallery in five years.

The series, "The Imitation of Life," named after a 1959 melodrama by Douglas Sirk, tackles aging by presenting Sherman in highly stylized glamour portraits inspired by the divas of old Hollywood, such as Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, and Ruby Keeler.

[92] In 2024, at the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, Sherman's first exhibition in Greece was held, gathering together over a hundred of her early works.

[93] In Sherman's Imitation of Life series of 2016 she poses, in vintage costume and theatrical makeup, as a variety of ageing actress-like women.

In a 1991 interview with David Brittain in Creative Camera, Sherman said that "I didn't really analyze it at the time as far as knowing that I was commenting upon some feminist issue.

Scholars like Hal Foster[100] and Laura Mulvey interpret Sherman's use of the abject via the grotesque in 1980s projects like Vomit Pictures as de-fetishizing the female body.

[112] Between 1991 and 2005,[113] Sherman lived in a fifth-floor co-op loft at 84 Mercer Street in Manhattan's Soho neighborhood; she later sold it to actor Hank Azaria.