Biography provided by Focal press
 
Sherman emerged as a key figure in the art world in the 1980s with her series Untitled Film Stills — black and white images that explore gender, identity, mythmaking and the media. She combines performance, masquerade, and photography's innate collusion with veracity to create film stills of herself as the solitary female heroine in an American drama; her fictional identities were inspired by movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Sherman's chameleon-like capacity for self-transformation, her blurring of the real and unreal, and her use of saturated color materials and large scale audaciously explore her notion of human identity as a cultural construct.
 
(Author: GW)
 
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409] (Used with permission)
 
Approved biography
Courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK)
 
Cindy Sherman became one of the most successful artists in the world during the 1980's. Her series of Untitled Film Stills examines archetypal images of women, by casting herself in the central role of every picture. Sherman makes us aware of just how immediately recognisable these images are and by acting out a bewildering variety of roles, surrounded by props, and altering her make-up, hair and costume, she shows how identities are a form of social performance. Her more recent work has used everything from historical costumes to false body parts to explore historical and forbidden images.
 
This biography is courtesy and copyright of the Victoria & Albert Museum and is included here with permission.
 
Wikipedia
 
Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. Her breakthrough work is often considered to be the collection Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself evoking typical female roles in performance media (especially arthouse films and popular B-movies).