Riva Lehrer is an artist, writer and curator who focuses on the socially challenged body. She is best known for representations of people whose physical embodiment, sexuality, or gender identity have long been stigmatized. 

Ms. Lehrer’s work has been seen in venues including the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, The Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University, the United Nations, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the Arnot Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the Frye Museum, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the State of Illinois Museum. 

Awards include the 2020 Disability Futures Fellowship of the Ford Foundation; the Nick and Keven Wilder Award for Excellence in Teaching, SAIC; 2017 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant; 2017 3Arts MacDowell Fellowship for writing; 2015 3Arts Residency Fellowship at the University of Illinois; the 2014 Carnegie Mellon Fellowship at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges; the 2009 Prairie Fellowship at the Ragdale Foundation. 

Grants include the 2009 Critical Fierceness Grant, the 2008 3Arts Foundation Grant, and the 2006 Wynn Newhouse Award for Excellence, (NYC), as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the University of Illinois, and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Lehrer’s memoir, Golem Girl, was published by the One World imprint of Penguin/Random House in October 2020, won the 2020 Barbellion Prize for Literature; was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and shortlisted for the Chicago review of Books 2020 CHIRBY Awards.

Riva Lehrer is represented by Regal Hoffman & Associates literary agency, NYC, and by Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago.

Ms. Lehrer was a longtime faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is instructor in the Medical Humanities Departments of Northwestern University.