Laurie Simmons (American, b. 1949) is a photographer and filmmaker who emerged in the late 1970s as part of the Pictures Generation, alongside artists including Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler and Sarah Charlesworth.She stages dolls, ventriloquist dummies, mannequins and costumed performers as human proxies in psychologically charged, often uncanny images that probe identity, gender and domesticity.,
Simmons earned a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1971.,She has said she has been photographing doll-like figures since 1976.In the late 1980s she began her Walking Objects series, persuading her friend and fellow photographer Jimmy De Sana — who had been diagnosed with AIDS two years earlier — to wear a life-size camera costume from the 1978 film The Wiz for Walking Camera II (Jimmy the Camera), a portrait that became a tribute to him after his death.She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1984), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1997) and the Roy Lichtenstein Residency at the American Academy in Rome (2005), and her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA and the Guggenheim, among others.,
In 2000 Simmons designed the Kaleidoscope House with architect Peter Wheelwright for Bozart Toys, a multicolor interactive dollhouse with miniature artworks contributed by artists including Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. Simmons has said she heard the set designers of the 2023 Barbie film were inspired by it.In 2015 she showed “How We See” at the Jewish Museum, candy-colored, larger-than-life portraits with the sitters' eyes closed and false eyes painted onto their lids, drawing on the doll girls subculture's pursuit of an idealized femininity.In 2006 she extended her staged-photography practice into film with The Music of Regret, which involved musicians, puppeteers, dancers from the Alvin Ailey company, cinematographer Ed Lachman and actress Meryl Streep.
In 2023 Simmons presented In and Around The House II, a text-to-image AI project curated by Claire Silver, at Paris Photo.,Of the process she said: “Writing sentences that convert to pictures feels oddly like a dream come true.”In 2026 she paired with digital artist Petra Cortright at Solos Gallery for Zero 10, Art Basel Hong Kong's digital sector, extending her decades of work on representation into AI.She also held “Black & White”, her first solo show at Almine Rech in Paris, presenting several 1976 photographs described as the genesis of all the art she has made since.,
