Laurie Simmons

Biography

Laurie Simmons (born October 3, 1949) is an American artist, photographer, and filmmaker whose work, since the mid-1970s, has staged scenes using dolls, ventriloquist dummies, and constructed sets to create images charged with psychological subtext and nonlinear narrative. Long associated with the Pictures Generation, Simmons has spent decades interrogating domesticity, gender, and artifice through elaborately staged photographic tableaux, often using surrogate figures to explore questions of representation, identity, and constructed femininity. In recent years, she has extended this lifelong inquiry into new technological territory, incorporating AI-generated imagery into her practice, treating artificial intelligence as a new kind of stage on which questions of artifice, control, and constructed reality can continue to be tested. Her recent series Autofiction, including works like My Collaborator, continues this exploration, using AI as a collaborator in the same way she has historically used staged photographic sets and figures. At Art Basel Hong Kong 2026's Zero 10 sector, Simmons's AI-driven work was presented by Solos Gallery alongside Petra Cortright, a pairing framed around two generations meeting in their shared interest in artificial and constructed realities, with Cortright working across digital painting and NFTs and Simmons bringing decades of representational work into dialogue with AI. Simmons is also known as the executor of the estate of photographer Jimmy DeSana, and continues to exhibit internationally, including recent solo presentations such as Underwater & Underneath.