Sharon Lockhart

Sharon Lockhart, born in 1964 in Massachusetts, is a photographer, filmmaker, and contemporary artist. She lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and the Art Institute of San Francisco in the early 1990s. Most of her films consist of fixed shots and constraints linked to the photographic medium, but also play with the frame and its out-of-frame. The entirety of her work is marked by suspension, a state of latency, near-immobility, with characters immersed in their own environment and routine. At the intersection of documentary imagery and the aestheticization of reality, the artist introduces elements of choreography and repetitive gestures executed by participatory subjects in the filmmaking process. In doing so, she goes beyond the notions of role and character, creating a shared space between the spontaneity of acts and situations that are truly staged. Her films and photographic works have been widely exhibited at international film festivals, museums, cultural institutions, and galleries around the world. She has been an associate professor at the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California and later at the California Institute of the Arts.