Cynthia Morris "Cindy" Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits.
Sherman was born on January 19, 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the youngest of five children of Dorothy and Charles Sherman. Shortly after her birth, her family moved to the township of Huntington, Long Island, where her father worked as an engineer for Grumman Aircraft. Her mother taught reading to children with learning difficulties.
People are often amazed that someone as “nice” as Cindy Sherman could be a major artist. By nice, I mean friendly; modest, warm, considerate, and even-tempered—qualities that we do not usually associate with artistic ego, and which might seem antithetical to the disturbing and phenomenally influential work that this artist has produced over the last twenty-three years. Since the early nineteen-eighties, when her now famous series of “Untitled Film Stills” caught the art world’s attention, Sherman’s photography-based art has presented us with deformed, disfigured, or demented people; still-lifes of spilled food and vomit; wicked parodies of Old Master paintings; grotesque, part-human monsters; medical mannequins arranged in pornographic poses; and, more recently, hideously distorted masks and mutilated dolls. These and other manifestations of Sherman’s singular talent have brought her virtually universal praise. Her name figured prominently on most end-of-the-millennium lists of the century’s leading artists. "The New Yorker"