We’re happy to announce that the eleventh annual Women in the Arts honorees are Laurie Simmons and Lena Dunham. For the past ten years, we presented this award for outstanding achievement by a leading member of the arts community in New York. Past honorees include Yoko Ono, Shirin Neshat, Kara Walker, Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, The Guerrilla Girls, Annie Liebovitz, Maya Lin, Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell, and Dr. Elizabeth A. Sackler.



Laurie Simmons is an internationally celebrated artist known for her staged photographic works. Her art is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney, among others. Actual Photos, her 1985 collaboration with Allan McCollum, is currently on view in The Encyclopedic Palace at the fifty-fifth Venice Biennale. Her latest photographic series, The Love Doll Days 1-36, chronicles her daily interaction with a life-sized sex doll from Japan.  She will have an exhibition at Salon 94, New York, in March 2014.



Alongside Simmons, her daughter Lena Dunham, creator and star of Girls, will also receive the award. Dunham and her hit HBO series received numerous accolades including two Golden Globe Awards, a Directors Guild of America Award for “Television Comedy Series," and a Writers Guild of America Award for "Best New Series." In 2010, Dunham won an Independent Spirit Award for "Best First Screenplay" for Tiny Furniture. She recently signed with Random House for a collection of essays titled Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s Learned.



Tickets begin at $500. Proceeds support the many educational and artistic programs offered by the Brooklyn Museum and its Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. 



For more information and to obtain tickets, please call the Development office at (718) 501-6436.