Julia Scher was born in
Hollywood 1954 as the daughter of a traveling salesman and a department store employee and grew up in Van Nuys, San Fernando Valley. In 1975 she received a B.A. in Painting/Sculpture/Graphic Arts from
U.C.L.A., and a 1984 M.F.A. in Studio Arts, from the
University of Minnesota. The title of her thesis was
American Landscape. Her first video art piece about women in security was
Safe & Secure in Minnesota in 1987. While her studio was based in Venice Beach Scher's work was influenced by "light and space" artists, like
Larry Bell and
Chris Burden,
Robert Graham,
Lynda Benglis. She did several sideline jobs to make a living and established her own company called "Safe and Secure Productions", installing security and surveillance equipment. At the same time Scher started using security cameras for her artwork. During the 1990s she was living and working in
New York and
Boston. In 1996 Julia Scher taught the first surveillance studies class in the United States at the
Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. She received a fellowship at
Harvard University/
Radcliffe Bunting Institute for the field Surveillance Studies 1996-1997 and has been teaching in the Visual Arts Program at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1997 - 2001 and 2005 - 2006. She has also lectured at a number of institutions, including The Cooper Union for Art and Science, Hartford University Art School, U.C.L.A., U.S.C, Harvard University, Columbia University, The
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Rutgers University. From 2006 to 2021 Julia Scher held the professorship for Multimedia and Performance / Surveillant Architectures at the
Academy of Media Arts Cologne (Kunsthochschule fuer Medien Koeln). ==Artwork==