Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director best known for her conceptual portraits. She was born in New Jersey in 1954 and currently lives and works in New York City. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship Award.

Sherman became interested in photography at Buffalo State College after abandoning painting because of what she saw as its limitations. "There was nothing more to say [through painting]," she later recalled. "I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead." Though Sherman had failed a required photography class as a freshman, she repeated the course with Barbara Jo Revelle, whom she credits with introducing her to conceptual art and other contemporary forms. While in college she met Robert Longo, and together with Charles Clough, created Hallwalls, an arts center in Buffalo, New York.

Sherman works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes. In her landmark 69 photograph series, the Complete Untitled Film Stills, (1977-1980) Sherman appeared as B-movie, foreign film and film noir style actresses. A series, dated 2003, features her as clowns. Although Sherman does not consider her work feminist, many of her photo-series, like the 1981 "Centerfolds," call attention to the stereotyping of women in films, television and magazines. In her work, she is both revealed and hidden, named and nameless.

She explained to the New York Times in 1990, "I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear." What emerges through these images is a subtle analysis of individual identity, both the fantasies that it generates and the forces that shape it.

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 images. These and other series, like the 1980s "Fairy Tales and Disasters" sequence, are shown at Metro Pictures Gallery in New York.

In 2006, The Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris hosted an exhibition, “Cindy Sherman: A Retrospective" including work spanning 30 years from 1975 to 2005.

Recent projects include a 2006 series of fashion advertisements for designer Marc Jacobs which were then photographed by photographer Juergen Teller and released as a monograph on April the 4th by Rizzoli.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Watch Sherman's 1975 video work "Doll Clothes":