Eleanor Antin

Eleanor Antin (born February 27, 1935) is an American photographer, author, and artist working with video, film, performance, and drawing. Originally from New York, USA, she is currently based in Southern California where she is a professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. Antin is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Art and continues to exhibit internationally.

Biography

Born Eleanor Fineman in the Bronx, New York on February 27, 1935 her parents emigrated in the 1930s from Rusch, a tiny town in Poland. Her father, Sol Fineman (1910–2004), was a socialist and atheist who worked in the garment industry in New York. Her mother, Jeanette Efron (1912–1994), a former actress in the Yiddish theater in Poland, was a communist and a creative entrepreneur. She went by the name Jeanette Fineman until she divorced and married the Hungarian poet and artist, Peter Moor, (ne Barna Josef, 1895–1989) and was thereafter known as Jeanette Barna. Eleanor had one sister, Marcia Goodman (1940–2003).

Eleanor attended Music and Art High School in New York as an art major, and City College of New York (CCNY), where she majored in writing and minored in art. From 1954–1956, she studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research and studied acting at the Tamara Daykarhanova School for the Stage. She was registered in Actors Equity and worked as an actress under the stage name Eleanor Barrett. In her last year of college she accepted an...
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