-
Artist: JEB [Joan E. Biren] (American)
portraits of daily life: women at work, at home, making art, playing music, raising families, performing rituals and loving each other. In 1987 she published Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front, a sequel of sorts.
In the 1970s, Biren toured the United States, photographing lesbians at women’s events ranging from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, anti–Ku Klux Klan demonstrations, writing workshops, sporting events, lesbian-separatist communities, and gay and lesbian pride marches. “Wherever lesbians gathered, where I could take pictures, I would be there.” And by making the lives of lesbians visible, she ensured that their history would not be lost.
Beginning in 1979 JEB toured the country presenting her slide show "Lesbian Images in Photography, 1850 to the Present," also known as "The Dyke Show," to women-only audiences. Other shows followed and gradually Biren expanded her art from exclusively still photography to include filmmaking. She documented the 1987 and 1993 gay and lesbian marches on Washington in For Love and For Life and A Simple Matter of Justice, and in 2003 produced an award-winning film on lesbian pioneers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, which tells the story of the co-founders, in 1955, of The Daughters of Billitis. The documentary follows Martin and Lyon's story through half a century, tracing a journey “from the fear of discovery to an expectation of equality.”
Biren was born in 1944 and grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. She majored in political science and graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1966. She completed three years of doctoral work in political science at Oxford University and later did graduate work in communications at American University. She joined The Women's Liberation Movement in Washington D.C. in 1969. Coming to feminism with a New Left political science background, Biren was actively involved in the formation of feminist and lesbian theory at a critical time in movement history. She and others, including Rita Mae Brown and Charlotte Bunch, formed a separatist lesbian-feminist collective, The Furies, in 1971. Though the collective, based in Washington, was short-lived, its members, through its publication of the same name, had a significant impact on the strategies and feminist theories of The Women's Movement.
Best known for her photographic portraits, some of the earliest documentation of late 20th-century lesbian life, Biren came out in the 1960s and realized the need for affirming images and self-expression of lesbian culture outside of traditional patriarchal language. “I couldn’t picture being a lesbian, life as a lesbian, because there were no lesbians living out lives to see.” Her work has appeared in off our backs, The Washington Blade, Gay Community News, and countless other publications as well as LP albums and book covers. In 1997 George Washington University organized "Queerly Visible," a retrospective exhibition of her photographs, which traveled the country.
A popular teacher and lecturer on college campuses over the years, Biren has been a featured speaker at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force annual Creating Change Conference, the National Women’s Studies Association, the National Women’s Music Festival, and the National Lesbian Physicians’ Conference, among many others.
![KITCHEN TABLE: WOMEN OF COLOR PRESS (f. 1980) by JEB [Joan E. Biren], Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Cherríe Moraga, Hattie Gossett, Image 1.](https://assets.artworkarchive.com/image/upload/t_jpg_medium_width/v1/user_11926/JEB_Kitchen_Table_holding_hands_1981_tteetn.jpg)