Writers@Grinnell Welcomes Riva Lehrer

Riva Lehrer is an artist, writer, and curator who focuses on the socially challenged body. She is best known for representations of people whose physical embodiment, sexuality, or gender identity have long been stigmatized. Ms. Lehrer’s work has been seen in venues including the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, Yale University, the United Nations, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the Arnot Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the Frye Museum, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the State of Illinois Museum.

Awards include the 2017 Arts MacDowell Fellowship for writing; the 2015 Arts Residency Fellowship at the University of Illinois; the 2014 Carnegie Mellon Fellowship at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges; the 2009 Prairie Fellowship at the Ragdale Foundation. Grants include the 2009 Critical Fierceness Grant, the 2008 Arts Foundation Grant, and the 2006 Wynn Newhouse Award for Excellence, (NYC), as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the University of Illinois, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Her memoir, Golem Girl, was published by the One World imprint of Penguin/Random House in October 2020 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It recounts her journey as a painter and a writer with spina bifida.

Ms. Lehrer is on faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an instructor in the Medical Humanities Departments of Northwestern University.