Cindy Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, NJ but moved to Long Island when she was three. As a child, she loved to play dress-up and began using her first Brownie camera. She graduated from SUNY College at Buffalo in 1976 with a fine-art degree and moved to New York City the following year after being awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She worked at the alternative gallery, Artists Space between 1977-81 while simultaneously developing her series of Untitled Film Stills, which were to become emblematic of post-modernism or appropriation art. Her 1982 series of centerfolds brought her international acclaim and subsequent series included takeoffs on fairy tales, fashion, pornography, old-master paintings and horror movies. In 1996, the Museum of Modern Art purchased the only complete set of 70 photos from the Untitled Film Stills, the same year that she directed her film The Office Killer. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation grant.
