Joanne Leonard

Statement:

Joanne Leonard was born in Hollywood California in l940. After high-school, Leonard studied and then taught in Northern California. She taught at University of California, Mills College and the San Francisco Art Institute until she began her teaching career at University of Michigan in l978. Since that time her home and studio have been in Ann Arbor.

In addition to her role as faculty member at School of Art and Design, Leonard serves on the Faculty of the Women's Studies Program and is a faculty Associate of the Program in American Culture. She has prized interdisciplinary approaches to her art, scholarship, and teaching since she was an undergraduate student in Social Sciences at University of California, Berkeley. She has taught collaborative classes with Anthropologist Ruth Behar, Psychologist Abigail Stewart, and American Culture scholar Kristin Hass. She is currently the director of Looking Into Visual Culture: Issues of Women and Gender, a program area of The Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

Her work in recent years has explored issues of "Sexuality (Discourses of Sexuality, From Aids to Aristotle", U of M Press) and "Memory (Not Losing Her Memory, Stories in Photographs, Words and Collage", Modern Fiction Studies). Her parents met in Berlin and her latest research/artistic work centers on issues of family, identity, immigration and dislocation. Her twin sister as well as her daughter, are artists.