Basic Info
Name: Nancy Burson
Country of Origin: US
Description
Nancy Burson was born in 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri. She studied painting at Colorado Women’s College in Denver from 1966 to 1968 before moving to New York City, where she found early support from Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT). She began collaborating with engineers and computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on research in image processing and facial analysis, work that resulted in a pioneering 1981 U.S. patent for a method of digitally aging human faces. Continuing her research in Cambridge with scientists Richard Carling and David Kramlich, she expanded its applications to successful collaborations with the FBI in missing persons and missing children cases.
By the early 1980s, Burson was applying these technologies to art, using computers to generate composite portraits that revealed how images shape ideas of identity and power. Warhead I showed the face of the nuclear age through a weighted blend of world leaders based on the number of warheads in their nuclear arsenals. Mankind presented a composite of global populations highlighting racial demographics, while Androgyny traced the shifting boundaries of gender. Drawing on 19th-century racial typologies, she exposed how photography has been used to construct systems of classification and belief. Her experiments laid the groundwork for what would become known as “morphing”—the digital transformation of one face into another.
In 1990, the MIT List Visual Arts Center presented The Age Machine and Composite Portraits, an exhibition of Burson’s interactive system for digital aging shown alongside computer-generated portraits. In 2002, her retrospective Seeing and Believing opened at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University before touring nationally and internationally, earning a nomination from the International Association of Art Critics for Best Solo Museum Exhibition in New York. Her gelatin silver print Androgyny (6 women + 6 men) was recognized by Time magazine as one of the 100 Photographs: The Most Influential Images of All Time, and her Time cover combining Trump and Putin went viral in July 2018.
Burson’s Human Race Machine, commissioned by Zaha Hadid for the London Millennium Dome, was used for over a decade as a diversity tool providing viewers with the visual experience of being another race. She has also completed important public art projects in New York City in collaboration with Creative Time, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Deutsche Bank, including the poster project “Visualize This” (1991), the billboard “There’s No Gene For Race” (2000), and “Focus on Peace,” commissioned for the first anniversary of 9/11. Her public artworks have been displayed as light projections in both the Berlin Festival of Light and the New York Festival of Light.
Her work is held in museum collections worldwide including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the International Center of Photography, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, LACMA, the Getty Museum, SFMOMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Smithsonian. Her photographs and interactive installations have appeared in major exhibitions at these institutions as well as the Venice Biennale and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Burson has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, Anonymous Was A Woman, the Peter Reed Foundation, and CAST (Collaborations in Art, Science and Technology).
Her work has been featured extensively in media including Oprah, Good Morning America, CBS Evening News, CNN, National Public Radio, PBS, and Fuji TV News, as well as in The New York Times Magazine, The Baltimore Sun, The Houston Chronicle, and Scientific American. Four monographs have been published on her work, and reproductions appear in hundreds of art catalogs and photography history textbooks in all languages.
Burson has served as a visiting professor at Harvard and was a member of the adjunct photography faculty at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for five years. She currently books events and reviews portfolios for the Photography Department at the New York Film Academy in New York City.
