About the Book

In Private I, Lynn Hershman Leeson—one of the most influential conceptual artists of our time—shares her personal journey and the struggle for her visionary work to be recognized as art. In the 1970s, women artists were often dismissed unless linked to more successful male counterparts. Defying this marginalization, Hershman Leeson carved her own path, creating groundbreaking conceptual works such as her Roberta Breitmore series, the Video Diaries, and films starring Tilda Swinton, including Conceiving Ada and Teknolust. Her innovative installations took place in unconventional venues—hotels, department store windows, San Quentin State Prison, and housing projects—while she raised her daughter and endured long periods of poverty.

To support fellow artists, she launched The Floating Museum, bringing site-specific art to reclaimed public spaces. She was also one of the first to document women artists’ lives and work in her acclaimed documentary !W.A.R. (Women, Art, Revolution). Private I traces her lifelong commitment to experimentation—embracing film, video, AI, chatbots, touch screens, even her own DNA—to challenge ideas of identity and warn of the perils of technology and surveillance. At its core, Private I is a moving portrait of resilience, artistic innovation, and personal transformation through friendship, family, and fearless creativity.

Praise for Lynn Hershman Leeson

“Lynn Hershman Leeson’s universe is the super-radical and unstoppably empowered kindergarten of all our wildest dreams: where no limit exists to our optimism and curiosity, where even our intellects can bask in glee and play.”

—Tilda Swinton

“I see in Lynn’s work: revolution in action, revolution in a frame, revolution at the speed of light as it tries to capture light. Lynn’s intelligence: lightning in a bottle with the cap almost coming off always because her energy is too great to contain, and no one medium can contain it, let alone one persona. So much to learn, to think about and observe.” 

—Hilton Als

“What’s astonishing, reading this memoir, is the sheer variety of technologies Hershman Leeson has engaged with across her career: video, interactive laser disc, bio-art, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic science, virtual agents, feature film. Few artists have moved so fluidly across so many platforms, and fewer still have done so while making the technology itself the subject of critique . . . Private I is not simply a recounting of career highlights. It is a living archive of multiplicity: child, artist, mother, collaborator, activist, film director, professor . . . This is what makes the memoir so compelling.”

—Mark Amerika, The Brooklyn Rail

“Private I, A Memoir (published by ZE Books, 2025), penned by artist and writer Lynn Hershman Leeson is a book I couldn’t recommend with more conviction. I beg, instead command, you to read this elucidating eye-opening chronicle of a prescient historical figure heralding a cultural period decades before it’s come to pass. The only thing worse than being behind the times is to be this far ahead. Even at 84 years-young, Leeson is and has been forever resilient, tenacious and relentlessly progressive . . . I  only wish I could compose an account as forthright and philosophically insightful as Lynn.”

—Kenny Schachter, ArtNet News

“Private I is a diary, an addendum, a manifesto—but perhaps most of all, the memoir is another art piece by Leeson, a hyper-generative artist who has long mainlined her lived experience into her work . . .  For young artists, Private I is encouragement: Despite financial struggles and depressive periods, Leeson has constantly made art . . . Private I is Leeson’s testimony, and it’s also crucial work: documentation of a watershed period in feminist art history and proof of Leeson as the consummate futurist interested in nascent technology, as well as the posterity of physical objects, cultural movements, and a generation of female artists.”

—Lydia Horne, Alta Journal

“Lynn Hershman Leeson has always been ahead of the pack in her fusion of art and science. As early as the 1960s she foresaw the technology-permeated world of today. She was making computer-based work in the 1970s, and went on to experiment with artificial intelligence and virtual reality as art media. At a time when so much new art feels so old, this work feels like the future, which is now.”

—Holland Cotter, The New York Times

“In our current age of digital avatars, technological surveillance, and turbulent identity politics, few artists seem as relevant—and arguably as oracular—as Lynn Hershman Leeson.”

—Robert Slifkin, The Art Review

 “Spanning half a century, the pioneering art of America’s Lynn Hershman Leeson is strange, beautiful and, best of all, funny.”
—Laura Cumming, The Guardian

 “Lynn Hershman Leeson was the originator of our current artistic zeitgeist, and the first to explore many of the groundbreaking ideas that shape our current reality. I’m grateful to Lynn for showing me what it means to subvert the mainstream and create on my own terms. Lynn was there, let the people know!!” 

—Martine Syms

About the Author