Liz Cohen

Liz Cohen (United States, 1973) is a photographer, performance artist, and object maker whose decades-long career focuses largely on the intersection of immigration, industry, labor, and women’s representation in popular media.

Cohen is perhaps best known for her BODYWORK project, in which she simultaneously transformed an East German Trabant into an American El Camino lowrider while inhabiting a new identity herself as a car customizer and bikini model. Through this immersive series, Cohen produced a body of work that challenges American cultural norms as they pertain to the eroticization of the automobile industry as well as the challenging role of women’s bodies in that space. Cohen’s series, BODY MAGIC (2020), sees the artist further explore similar themes. In black and white photographs, Cohen poses with the iconic lowrider model Dazza del Rio in images that make reference to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of the bodybuilder Lisa Lyon.

Cohen’s work is interdisciplinary, bringing together inquiry in women’s studies, literature, poetry, and auto mechanics, as well as expertise in documentary photography, performance, video, installation, and sculpture.