Nan
Goldin

Nancy “Nan” Goldin was born in Washington, D.C. in 1953. The youngest of four children, she admired her rebellious and troubled older sister whose tragic suicide at the age of 19 left a permanent emotional mark on her. Nan was sent to an alternative free school where, instead of a formal education, she was given a camera. She learned about photography reading stolen French and Italian Vogue magazines and got on track with her lifelong theme after seeing Larry Clark’s book Tulsa, a chronicle of wayward young people. She graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston in 1977 and moved to New York, where she lived and worked until 2001, when she moved to Paris. She now lives between New York and Berlin. 

Her work has been the subject of two major touring retrospectives: one organized in 1996 by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the other, in 2001, by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Between 2016 and 2017, her quintessential installation The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was shown at the MoMa, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea in Milan and the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne. She received the Medal of the City of Paris in 2004; the award of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, in 2006; the Hasselblad Award in 2007 and the Edward MacDowell Medal in 2012.