1949-

Laurie Simmons was born in Long Island, New York. She received a BFA from Tyler School of Art in 1971. Simmons lives and works in New York City and Cornwall, Connecticut with her husband, the painter Carroll Dunham. Since the mid 1970s, Simmons has staged scenes for her camera with dolls, ventriloquist dummies, objects on legs and occasionally people, to create "images with intensely psychological subtexts". Curator Jan Howard stated that Simmons was a part of a new generation of artists pursuing the artistic tradition of staging fictional scenes to be photographed. “By inventing information through their photographs in response to the images that surrounded them, Simmons and others drew attention to the impact of media on our conception of reality.”