Nancy Burson

Nancy Burson is born in St. Louis in 1948 and studies at Colorado Women’s College in Denver.

Working with engineers at MIT on image processing and facial analysis, she helps develop a way to age faces digitally, a technique later used to age photographs of missing persons. In the early 1980s she makes composite portraits, among them Warhead I, which blends the faces of world leaders weighted by the size of their nuclear arsenals.

Her Human Race Machine, which shows viewers their own faces as other races, debuts in London in 2000. Her retrospective, Seeing and Believing, opens at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in 2002.