Cindy Sherman (born 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey) enrolled at Buffalo State College in 1972 intending to become a painter, but grew frustrated with what she later described as "meticulously copying other art" — a medium, she felt, with nothing left to say. She initially failed a required photography course, then repeated it, and the second attempt ignited the practice that would define her entire career. At Buffalo, she met Robert Longo, and together with Charles Clough and several fellow students, the two co-founded Hallwalls, an artist-run exhibition space carved out of a converted ice factory's hallway in 1974. Sherman and Longo were partners at the time; in 1977, the two moved to New York together.

That same year, Sherman began Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) — 69 black-and-white photographs styled as publicity stills from 1950s and 60s Hollywood B-movies, each depicting Sherman herself as an unnamed, instantly recognisable "type": the housewife, the ingénue, the femme fatale. She worked entirely alone, acting as photographer, stylist, and subject simultaneously, deliberately leaving each image untitled and unexplained. "I am trying to make other people recognise something of themselves rather than me," she has said of the method — the photographs are not self-portraits, despite her constant presence in them, because the person depicted was never Sherman at all.

Recognition arrived quickly. MoMA acquired the complete Untitled Film Stills series in 1995 for $1 million, and Sherman has since been the subject of major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art (1997, 2012), the Whitney Museum, and London's National Portrait Gallery (2019). She has continued expanding her practice through series addressing horror, art-historical pastiche, and grotesque caricature, alongside a feature film, Office Killer (1997). She lives and works in New York.

Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), her breakthrough series of 69 photographs, remains her most iconic body of work — cinematic imagery so convincingly familiar that viewers routinely mistake it for stills from films that never existed.

Untitled #96 (1981), Sherman's auction record at $3,890,500 (Christie's New York, 2011), briefly made her the most expensive photographer in history, a title Andreas Gursky's Rhein II overtook just months later that same year.

Untitled #153 (1985), from her Fairy Tales series, depicts Sherman as a mud-flecked, seemingly lifeless figure staring vacantly into the distance — one of her most unsettling images, selling for $2.77 million at Phillips in 2010.

Because Sherman's photographic negatives allow for continued printing, her practice has always operated through editions rather than true uniques — chromogenic colour prints produced in numbered runs, hand-signed, extending the same conceptual rigour of her larger photographic works into more accessible formats. Her editions frequently draw directly from major series, including Untitled Film Stills and later portrait cycles, translating key images into collectible print form.

Because her most significant photographs regularly reach seven figures at auction, her broader body of signed prints and editions offers considerably more accessible entry into a practice fundamental to how contemporary art understands identity and representation.

For collectors, Sherman's editions provide direct access to a central figure of the Pictures Generation, working alongside contemporaries including Robert Longo and Richard Prince. Works are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou.