Lesley Dill

Lesley Dill is an American artist working at the intersection of language and fine art in printmaking, sculpture, installation, and performance, exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche. Dill transforms the emotions of the writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, into works of paper, wire, horsehair, foil, bronze, and music—works that awaken the viewer to the physical intimacy and power of language itself.

Dill has had over one hundred solo exhibitions. Her artworks are in the collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2017, she was named a fellow of The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and is a Joan Mitchell Foundation Creating A Living Legacy artist and grant recipient.

Her opera, Divide Light, which she based on the poems of Emily Dickinson, premiered in San Jose in 2008 and was re-staged in 2018 by the New Camerata Opera Company in New York City. This performance was captured in a full-length film by Ed Robbins and honored as an Official Selection of the Art FIFA Film Festival 2021 in Montreal. Dill was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s 2019 Tell it Slant Award and is a featured essayist and cover artist for the 2022 Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson.

In 2021, the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, was the first of 6 venues to present Dill’s exhibition Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me, which amplifies voices of the North American past as they wrestle with divinity, deviltry, and freedom. The artist is represented by Nohra Haime Gallery in New York and Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans.

Lesley Dill lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Visit Lesley Dill’s website by clicking HERE.