Nikki S. Lee

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Nikki S. Lee is a Korean-born, New York City-based artist, photographer, and filmmaker, born in 1970. She moved to New York in 1996 and attended the Fashion Institute of Technology. She earned her M.A. in photography at New York University in 1998.

Lee's most noted work, Projects (1997-2001), begun while still in school, depicts her in snapshot photographs, in which she poses with various ethnic and social groups, including drag queens, punks, swing dancers, senior citizens, Latinos, hip-hop musicians and fans, skateboarders, lesbians, young urban professionals, and Korean schoolgirls. Lee conceives of her work as less about creating beautiful pictures, and more about investigating notions of identity and the uses of vernacular photography. She is often compared to American artist Cindy Sherman.

A more recent series by Lee, entitled Parts (2002-2005) features images of Lee posing in different settings with a male partner, cropped to make it impossible to directly see who she is with.

In 2006 Lee released a film, A.K.A. Nikki S. Lee. The project, described as a "conceptual documentary," alternates segments presenting Lee as two distinct personalities, a reserved academic and an outgoing socialite. It had its premier at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, October 5–7, 2006.

Among other locations, Lee has had solo exhibitions of her work at major international institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. Her works are in the collections of major museums, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Fukuoka, Japan; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Lee is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York.

Two monographs on Lee's work have been published:

Nikki S. Lee: Parts. Text by RoseLee Goldberg (Hatje Cantz, 2005) and Nikki S. Lee: Projects. Essays by Russell Ferguson and Gilbert Vicario (Hatje Cantz, 2001).