Bio

 

NICOLE COHEN

Artist

NICOLE COHEN

Nicole Cohen is a contemporary American multimedia artist whose work dynamically intersects time-based video installations, historical research, and drawing. Her practice routinely investigates the psychology of spaces, exploring the invisible power structures that govern social etiquette, performance anxiety, and the historical scripts of expected human behavior within both private and public life.

“Cohen works with images of historical places and creates performances that overlay onto the static photo frozen in time to the ever-changing reality of today, using people selected from the street to show what time we are living in today. The juxtaposition of the past and photo give us a better understanding of identity of how place and time, can reveal our progress. Whether this “progress” is about the development of mankind and how we live and grow, shaping new realities through time. “

Key Themes & Artistic Philosophy

  • The Concept of "Home": A recurring anchor throughout Cohen’s career, "home" is treated not just as a physical structure, but as an amorphous repository—a place to rest, reboot, express personal style, self-reflect, and contemplate.

  • The Layering of Time: Cohen works heavily with video collage, recording the recent past or contemporary performers and seamlessly superimposing them into vintage magazines, books, or archival historical drawings. This time-lapse synthesis blurs the boundaries between past and present, challenging how history alters the ways we identify ourselve

  • The Interior/Exterior Binary: Her projects often employ images of interiors to dissect the gap between contemporary comforts and our historical imaginings. Her French Connection project marked her first land-driven venture using interiors and exteriors simultaneously.

Education & Professional Background

Cohen received her formal training in Southern California, earning her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles. While building a career on an international stage, she has worked out of major cultural centers, including Berlin, Germany, where she lived and adapted to a completely different culture and historically charged environment while realizing her French Connection project.

Major Museum Commissions & Exhibitions

Cohen's work has been celebrated globally, with notable features across the United States, Germany, France, Japan, Norway, Korea, and China.

  • Please Be Seated at the J. Paul Getty Museum: Commissioned by the Getty Center, this major interactive video installation ran from 2007 to 2009. Cohen famously fabricated all-white replicas of historic French chairs from the museum's permanent collection. When visitors sat in them, overhead screens seamlessly transported their real-time images back into the original, opulent 18th-century interiors from which the furniture originated.

  • My Vie en Rose at the Williams College Museum of Art: A solo museum exhibition hosted in Massachusetts.

  • Other Notable Institutions: Her art has been included in curated presentations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Pennsylvania, and a prominent solo presentation at the Katzen Art Center at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C.

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She received her BA from Hampshire College and her MFA from the Roski School of Fine Arts at U.S.C in LA. In 2024, she had a mid-career retrospective show, Super Vision at the Zuccaire Gallery in Stony Brook University on Long Island, NY. Her artist catalog, Super Vision was produced there. View here.

She has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Los Angeles County of Art, Williams College Museum of Art, Please Be Seated, An Interactive Video Inatallation, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Autostadt, Wolfsburg, VW, Schloss Britz in Berlin (Marilyn Monroe Interiors with Bert Stern), Germany, American University Museum at Katzen Art Center, Wave Hill Public Gardens and Cultural Center in the Bronx, The Museum of the Moving Image, in 2026 at The Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA) Korea, L’Space Gallery in NYC, and at the Romanian Cultural Institute in NYC.

SELECTED ART COLLECTIONS: Cedar Sinai Hospital Art Collection, Los Angeles Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA, The J. Paul Getty Museum of Art, US Art in Embassies (AIE) U.S. Department of State, The Hague, Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, CA, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, Volkswagen VW (Wolfsburg, Germany), Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruise Ship, Norweigan Cruise Ship, LOOP Video Art Festival Collection, Barcelona, Spain and private collections in London, Paris, Germany, and in the U.S.

"Her work is positioned at the crossroads of contemporary reality, personal fantasy, and culturally constructed space. Although trained in painting and drawing, Cohen most frequently uses video as her medium, playing upon its intrinsic capacities to manipulate time, distort scale and environment, and overlay imagery. Consistently interested in engaging her audience and challenging notions of lifestyle, domesticity, celebrity, and social behavior, Cohen also uses the surveillance camera to involve her viewers in their own voyeurism. Her work projects serve as some of the most paradigmatic and successful examples.”, Please Be Seated brochure, Solo Exhibition at the Getty Museum.

She currently teaches at Pace University Art Department and founded Curatedbyonlineartclasses.com

She is the Founder of the Berlin Collective, An International Artist Platform 2009-2022 and Art Bound Initiative, An International Internship program. (ABI)