Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939) is a multi-disciplinary artist. She transformed the definition of art, especially discourse on the body, sexuality and gender. The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body. She has taught at many institutions including New York University, California Institute of the Arts, Bard College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recipient of a 1999 Art Pace International Artist Residency, San Antonio, Texas; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1997, 1998); 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship; Gottlieb Foundation Grant; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Schneemann trained as a painter during the 1950s at Columbia University, New York City, Bard College, New York and the University of Illinois, Urbana. Although her reputation as an artist was built on her pioneering work in performance and film, she thinks of herself as a painter. Her radical early performance, Eye Body 1963 and Meat Joy 1964, brought first the artist’s naked body and then the semi-naked bodies of a group of young performers into the expressive realm of the painter’s canvas. In such films as Fuses 1964-7 (based on footage of Schneemann and her partner making love) and in many of her later performances, Schneemann insisted on the body explicitly sexual. Her refusal to divorce sexual experience from art making was intended as a return to the body as a source of knowledge and experience (as the artist perceived it to be for archaic cultures) and to unify its internal energies with the visual information it provides. In the context of the women’s movement in the 1970s, Schneemann’s performances introduced the body of the female artist as the source of her creative and imaginative energy as well as the site and the subject of the work.