Sharon Lockhart doesn’t take photographs—she makes them. An experimental filmmaker as well as a photographer, she conceptualizes each shot with the eye of a director, casting, staging and capturing in ways that constantly redraw the line between dynamic and static. In both formats, her socially grounded subject matters—a girls’ basketball team, construction workers, youth in a rural village—have brought her international acclaim.

Lockhart’s first photographic series, Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team (1998), was created in conjunction with her first film, Goshogaoka, where the camera in the former takes on fluid points of view and the camera in the latter remains fixed. Her project Lunch Break (2008) is an anthropological portrait of ironworkers at Bath Iron Works shipyard on a lunch break. A moving image of the workers eating lunch accompanies photos of the lunch boxes as still-lives of their daily routines. Her 2009 film, Podwórka, captures a blighted Polish city as children turn it into their playground. In 2011 Lockhart exhibited a two-person installation in collaboration with Noa Eshkol (1924–2007), an Israeli dance choreographer, dance theorist and textile artist.

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The recipient of numerous fellowships and grants, Lockhart has received the MacDowell Fellowship, LEF Foundation Grant, Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Filmmaking Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship and, recently, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in 2015.

Lockhart’s art has been shown in countless art and cultural institutions around the world, including solo exhibitions at Gladstone Gallery in New York City, Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland, Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, Centre for Contemporary Art in Ujazdów Castle in Warsaw, The Jewish Museum in New York City, Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló in Spain and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Her work is held in public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles; U.S. Embassy, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; The Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan. Her films have been included in international film festivals in Seoul, Warsaw, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Rotterdam, Toronto, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Vienna and Stockholm.

Lockhart is on the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts’ program in photography and media, and she was an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Fine Arts. She has a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from ArtCenter.