Martha Rosler was born in 1943 Brooklyn, New York, where she lives and works.

Rosler works with video, photography, text, installation, and performance. Her work focuses on the public sphere, exploring issues that range from from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially as they affect women.

Rosler has for many years produced works on war and the national security climate — connecting life at home with the conduct of war abroad — in which her photomontage series played a critical part. She has also published several books of photographs, texts, and commentary on public space, ranging from airports and roads to housing and gentrification. Her writing appeared numerous times in publications such as Artforum, e-flux journal, and Texte zur Kunst. In 2012, she presented a series of photographs, shot during her trip to Cuba in January 1981, while on a tour organized by Ana Mendieta and Lucy Lippard. Taken only two months after Reagan’s election as president and three months after the culmination of the six-month-long Mariel boatlift, these photographs regard Havana’s military uniform stores, Brutalist architecture, and portraits of Che dispassionately, as so much context for the staging of Cuban public life.

Rosler has had numerous solo exhibitions at various international institutions including: MARe Museum of Recent Art in Bucharest (2022); Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma, Spain (2020); MAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile (2019); The Jewish Museum, New York (2018); Kunstmuseum Basel (2018); MACBA, Barcelona (2017); Seattle Museum of Art (2016); Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2013), MOMA, New York, (2012); The Centro José Guerrero, Granada (2009-10); La Virreina, Barcelona (2010), the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007); the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1990); and the Dia Art Foundation, New York (1989). She has been included in numerous group exhibitions at institutions such as the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2017); The Serralves Museum, Porto (2017); The Brooklyn Museum, New York (2015); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2013); the LA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, (2011); Skulptur Projekte Münster 07 (2007); dOCUMENTA 7 (1982) & dOCUMENTA 12 (2007), Kassel; the Venice Biennale (2003); the Liverpool Biennial (2004); Tate Modern, London (2005, 2015).