Nancy Burson

Nancy Burson was born in 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri. She studied painting at Colorado Women’s College in Denver from 1966 to 1968 before moving to New York City. There she found early support from EAT, Experiments in Art and Technology and began collaborating with engineers and computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on research in image processing and facial analysis. That work resulted in the pioneering 1981 U.S. patent for a method of digitally aging human faces. She continued her research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with scientists Richard Carling and David Kramlich, expanding its applications to successful collaborations with the FBI in missing person’s cases as well as missing children’s cases.

By the early ‘80s, Burson was applying these same technologies to art, using computers to generate composite portraits that revealed how images shape ideas of identity and power. Warhead I showed the face of the nuclear age through a weighted blend of world leaders and the number of warheads in their nuclear arsenals. Mankind presented a composite of global populations highlighting the results of population statistics by race, and Androgyny traced the shifting boundaries of gender. In works like Mankind, she drew on 19th-century racial typologies to expose how photography has been used to construct systems of classification and belief. She also developed aging interactive prototypes, allowing viewers to experience digital transformation directly, an approach that anticipated her later participatory projects. Her experiments laid the groundwork for what would be known as “morphing”, the digital transformation of one face into another.

In 1990 the MIT List Visual Arts Center presented The Age Machine and Composite Portraits, an exhibition of Burson’s interactive system for digital aging shown alongside a series of computer-generated portraits. In 2002, her retrospective Seeing and Believing, opened at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University before touring nationally and internationally, earning a nomination from the International Association of Art Critics for Best Solo Museum Exhibition in New York. Her photographs and interactive installations have appeared in major exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the International Center of Photography, the Venice Biennale, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Burson has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, Anonymous Was A Woman, and other foundations. Her gelatin silver print Androgyny, (6 women + six men) was recognized by Time magazine as one of the 100 Photographs: The Most Influential Images of All Time.