Background
Eileen Cowin was born on August 17, 1947 in Brooklyn, New York, United States.
Eileen Cowin was born on August 17, 1947 in Brooklyn, New York, United States.
Eileen Cowin attended State University of New York at New Paltz (Bachelor of Science, 1968), where artist and professor Robert Schuler was a key influence. She continued her studies at IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, (Master of Science, Photography, 1970) with modernist photographers Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siegel.
Eileen Cowin exhibited during and just after graduate school, including group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Fogg Museum, and a solo exhibition at the Witkin Gallery in New York (1972).
From 1971-1975, she taught photography at Franconia College in New Hampshire, before becoming a professor at California State University, Fullerton in 1975, where she taught until retiring in 2008.
Cowin's work quickly became associated with key postmodern and feminist currents, drawing attention on both coasts. She had notable solo exhibitions at LACMA (1985), Museum of Contemporary Photography (1991), Cleveland Museum of Art (1998), a traveling retrospective at the Amory Center for the Arts and Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati (2000), and gallery shows at OK Harris and Jayne H. Baum (New York City) and Roy Boyd Gallery (Santa Monica), among others. Her work was also included in the Whitney Biennial (1983), the traveling exhibitions "Photography in California, 1945 - 1980" (SFMOMA, 1984-1986) and "Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the Twentieth Century" (Saint Louis Art Museum, 1997), the three-person exhibition, "Narrative Interventions in Photography" (Getty Museum, 2011), and the survey, "Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981" (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2011).