Lorna Simpson (born August 13, 1960) is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became one of the first African-American women to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.

Lorna Simpson was born on August 13, 1960, and grew up in Queens and Brooklyn, New York. Her parents, a Jamaican-Cuban father and African-American mother, took her to numerous plays, museums, concerts and dance performances as a child. Simpson attended the High School of Art and Design and took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago in summer while visiting her grandmother.

Prior to receiving her BFA, Simpson traveled Europe, Africa, and the United States further developing her skills through documentary photography. Simpson attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 1982. During that time, she interned at the Studio Museum in Harlem, acquainting herself with the practice of artist in residence David Hammons.

Simpson earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California at San Diego in 1985. Her focus was between Photography and Conceptual art, and her teachers included Allan Kaprow, Eleanor Antin, filmmakers Babette Mangolte, Jean-Pierre Gorin and poet David Antin. Here she developed her signature style of combining text with studio-like portraiture, while questioning if documentary photography was factual or served as a constructed truth generated by photographer themselves. These works analyzed stereotypical narratives of African-American women within American culture.

Simpson was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1985, and in 1990, she became one of the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She was also the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art with her Projects 23 exhibition. In 1990, Simpson had one woman exhibitions at several major museums, including the Denver Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. At the same time, her work was included in The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s, an exhibition presented by The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

In 1997, Simpson received the Artist-in-Residence grant from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, where she exhibited her works in photography. In 2001, she was awarded the Whitney Museum of Art Award, and in 2007, her work was featured in a 20-year retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in her hometown of New York.

Simpson's first European retrospective opened at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2013, then traveled to Germany, England, and Massachusetts. She has been one of a handful of African-American artists to exhibit at the Jamaica Arts Center in Queens, New York and then to the gallery in Soho.

She first exhibited paintings in 2015 at the 56th Venice Biennale, followed by a showing at the Salon 94 Bowery.