Francesca Stern Woodman (April 3, 1958 – January 19, 1981) was an American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring either herself or female models.

Many of her photographs show women, naked or clothed, blurred (due to movement and long exposure times), merging with their surroundings, or whose faces are obscured.

After spending the summer of 1979 in Stanwood, Washington[14] visiting her boyfriend at Pilchuck Glass School, she returned to New York "to make a career in photography."

[17] On January 19, 1981, Woodman died by suicide at age 22 by jumping out of a loft window of a building on the East Side of New York City.

[27] At RISD, Woodman borrowed a video camera and VTR[28] and created videotapes related to her photographs in which she "methodically whitewashes her own naked body, for instance, or compares her torso to images of classical statuary.

[4] Although the published version of the book has purple-pink covers, the interior pages are printed using only black, white, and shades of gray.

[35] In 1999, a critic was of the opinion that Some Disordered Interior Geometries was "a distinctively bizarre book… a seemingly deranged miasma of mathematical formulae, photographs of herself and scrawled, snaking, handwritten notes.

"[37] An acquaintance of Woodman wrote in 2000 that it "was a very peculiar little book indeed," with "a strangely ironic distance between the soft intimacy of the bodies in the photographs and the angularity of the geometric rules that covered the pages.

[48] Among her major solo exhibitions were: In 2000, an experimental video The Fancy, by Elisabeth Subrin, examined Woodman's life and work, "pos[ing] questions about biographical form, history and fantasy, female subjectivity, and issues of authorship and intellectual property.

"[60][61] Reviewers noted that the video juxtaposes "formalism, biography, and psychoanalysis"[62] and "hints at conspiracy, calling attention to the Woodman family's unwillingness to make the bulk of her body of photography available….

"[63] A feature-length documentary The Woodmans, was released theatrically by Lorber Films[64][65] on the thirtieth anniversary of her death, 18 January 2011.

Among other factors, critics and historians have written that Woodman was influenced by the following literary genre, myth, artistic movement, and photographers: