Carolee Schneemann was born in 1939 in Pennsylvania, USA. Her father, a doctor, gave her an early introduction to the body and its viscera. She received a scholarship to Bard College at 16 and left to study in New York, ending up at Columbia. “I had never found a precedent of woman artists in the art history books that were available to me,” Schneemann said in 2017.
Schneemann worked for many years honing her multimedia practice. This included performances, film, photography and painting, exemplified by the 1963 photo series Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for the Camera, in which she photographed herself naked and covered in paint, glue, fur, snakes and feathers, at once the seer and the seen.
