Joanne Leonard is an American artist renowned for her transformative and expansive conceptual photographic practice. This later developed into new forms of photo-collage to explore the overlooked spaces, conditions and moments within women’s working and parenting lives. In her series Dreams and Nightmares, she addresses heterosexual desire and its tragedies as well as images of the strange and often disturbing beauty of modern domestic appliances and kitchen spaces. Leonard’s work was hailed by American feminist critic Lucy Lippard in her collection From the Center (1976). Leonard is also widely studied for intermedial work, text and images in Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (2008).
Leonard’s photographs have been collected by and featured in exhibitions at major museums, including; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, New York and the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas. Her work was shown in the group exhibition Medium & Memory, curated by Griselda Pollock at HackelBury in 2023 and work has recently been acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Her work is currently on show at the ICP in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
In addition to her celebrated artistic practice, Leonard has cultivated a distinguished record as both scholar and educator. Leonard is one of the few photographers and women artists published in Janson’s History of Art. She completed thirty-one years on the faculty at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, earning the title of Diane M. Kirkpatrick and Griselda Pollock Distinguished University Professor in 2004. During her tenure, Leonard was Director of the Program in Visual Culture at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender for three years and received the John H. D’arms Faculty Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities in 2001. She retired in 2009 after dedicating forty years of her life to teaching as a college professor.