Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer whose multimedia installation The Dinner Party, created between 1974 and 1979, is widely regarded as one of the foundational works of feminist art. Across more than six decades she has worked in painting, ceramics, embroidery, fireworks, and large-scale collaborative installation, and she helped pioneer the first feminist art education programs in the United States.

She was born Judith Sylvia Cohen on July 20, 1939, in Chicago, Illinois, the elder of two children of Arthur M. Cohen, a labor organizer and descendant of twenty-three generations of rabbis, and May Levenson Cohen, a medical secretary who had trained as a dancer. Raised in a left-wing Jewish household on Chicago's North Side, she began drawing classes at the Art Institute of Chicago at age five. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in fine arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1962 and 1964.

In 1970 she legally changed her surname to Chicago, declaring her independence from male-defined naming conventions. That same year she founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno, moving it the next year to the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

With Miriam Schapiro she opened Womanhouse in 1972. The Dinner Party, with its triangular table set for thirty-nine notable women, drew roughly one million visitors during its 1979 to 1989 international tour and entered the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. Later major projects include The Birth Project, Holocaust Project, and The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction. She lives in Belen, New Mexico, with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman.

The feminine name Judy began as an English pet form of Judith, from the Hebrew Yehudit meaning woman of Judea. She has worn it as a manifesto.