Lesley Dill

(Bronxville, New York, 1950 - )

North America, American

Lesley Dill has created accomplished works in a variety of media, including sculpture, printmaking, photography and performance. An English major in college, she received an MA in art education at Smith College and returned to school to earn her MFA in studio art from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. For Dill, language serves as “the touchstone, the pivot point of all my work.” Among key influences on her art were her mother’s gift of a book of Emily Dickinson’s poetry for her 40th birthday and a two-year sojourn in New Delhi soon after. Dill began working with paper and thread during her time in India, and the importance of words in the culture reinforced her interest in language.

Dill has received awards from Anonymous Was A Woman and the Rockefeller Foundation Multi Artists Production Award with Tom Morgan (both 2008), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1996) and a National Endowment for the Arts, Sculpture Fellowship (1990), among other honors. She has been accorded a number of one-person exhibitions, including a mid-career survey organized by the Hunter Museum of American Art in 2009, which traveled to the Smith College Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida; Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State University; and the Arkansas Art Center and the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina. Among the many museum collections in which Lesley Dill is represented are those of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Lives Brooklyn, New York

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