BIOGRAPHY

Leslie Starobin is a Professor Emerita of Art at Framingham State University in Framingham, MA. Throughout her career, unraveling the threads of human memory has been central to her creative process. Her photographs, photo-narratives, and still-life montages are inspired by people and places steeped in family history, enriched by cultural traditions, and central to world history and the environment.

Starobin's artwork is in the permanent collection of many American museums, including the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Jewish Museum, NY, NY; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, NY, NY; The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at University of California at Berkeley, CA; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; and the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.

Throughout her career, Starobin has received numerous awards and grants. In 2023, she received a Combined Jewish Philanthropies Arts & Culture Community Grant Fund to support her oral history, film, and photo-narrative project, “Looming in the Shadows of Łódź.” In 2020, she received a grant from the Framingham Cultural Council, a subsidiary of the Massachusetts Cultural Council, to support this project. In 2008 and 2007, Starobin received grants from the Hadassah Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA for her still-life montage project, “The Last Address.” Starobin has also received fellowships from the New England Foundation for the Arts/Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture in NY, NY, and the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC. Early in her career, she received a Kinnicutt Travel Grant from the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, MA.

Starobin's photographs, photo-narratives, and still-life montages have been exhibited at numerous museums, including at the American Sephardi Federation at the Center for Jewish History in NY, NY. In 2024, she will have a solo exhibition of her still life montages from the series, “The Last Address,” at Olin College in Needham, MA. Thirty of her photo-narratives from “Looming in the Shadows of Łódź” will be included in a multi-generational, multi-media show at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in Boone, NC. In 2015, she had a solo exhibit entitled Dear Dearest Mother at the Danforth Art Museum in Framingham, MA. In 2012-13, she had a solo exhibit entitled Inheritance: Stories of Memory and Discovery at the Holocaust Museum Houston, Houston, TX. In 1990, she had a solo exhibit entitled “Dancers' Feet: Photographs by Leslie Starobin” at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC.

Starobin received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in California and her BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.