Julia Scher - Life and Work

Life and Work

Julia Scher was born in Hollywood 1954 as the daughter of a traveling salesman and a department store employee and grew up in Van Nuys, San Fernando Valley. In 1975 she received a B.A. in Painting/Sculpture/Graphic Arts from U.C.L.A., and a 1984 M.F.A. in Studio Arts, from the University of Minnesota. The title of her thesis was American Landscape. Her first video art piece about women in security was Safe & Secure in Minnesota in 1987. While her studio was based in Venice Beach Scher's work was influenced by "light and space" artists, like Larry Bell and Chris Burden, Robert Graham, Lynda Benglis. She did several sideline jobs to make a living and established her own company called "Safe and Secure Productions", installing security and surveillance equipment. At the same time Scher started using security cameras for her artwork. During the 1990ies she was living and working in New York and Boston.

In 1996 Julia Scher taught the first Surveillance Studies class in the United States at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. She received a fellowship at Harvard University/Radcliffe Bunting Institute for the field Surveillance Studies 1996-1997 and has been teaching in the Visual Arts Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1997 - 2001 and 2005 - 2006. She has also lectured at a number of institutions including The Cooper Union for Art and Science, Hartford University Art School, U.C.L.A., U.S.C, Harvard University, Columbia University, The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Rutgers University. Since 2006 Julia Scher holds the professorship for Multimedia and Performance / Surveillant Architectures at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (Kunsthochschule fuer Medien Koeln).