Faculty Lecture Series: Liz Cohen

Liz Cohen, a Colombian-American photographer and performance artist born in 1973, is best known for her project "BODYWORK," in which she transformed an aging East German Trabant into an American El Camino lowrider, and herself into a car customizer and bikini model. Cohen's earlier work "CANAL," a series of black and white photographs and performances, documents sex workers on the fringe of the Panama Canal Zone. In her more recent work, "HIM," she depicts an ostracized poet through black and white photographs, weaving and collaged textiles. Cohen's work has been characterized as examining immigration, nonconformity and resistance. Cohen has received awards from the MacDowell Colony, Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Creative Capital Foundation and the Kresge Foundation. She has exhibited work at Site Santa Fe, Ballroom Marfa, the Cranbrook Art Museum, Färgfabriken and Museum Tinguely. Her projects have been written about in the New York Times, Art in America and Lowrider Magazine. 

Cohen received a Master of Fine Arts in photography from the California College of the Arts. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in studio art from the School of Museum of Fine Arts and a degree in philosophy from Tufts University. Cohen's work is interdisciplinary, bringing together inquiry in women's studies, literature, poetry and auto mechanics as well as expertise in documentary photography, performance, video, installation and sculpture.