Joan Jonas (born in 1936 in New York, US, where she lives and works) received a B.A. in Art History from Mount Holyoke College, Mount Holyoke, MA (1958), studied sculpture at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1958 to 1961, and received an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Columbia University, New York, in 1965. Since 2000 she has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video and performance art. Her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 70s were essential to the formulation of these media. In works that examined space and perceptual phenomena, she merged elements of dance, modern theatre, the conventions of Japanese Noh and Kabuki theatre and the visual arts. Her influence has been crucial since. Jonas has performed and exhibited her work extensively throughout the world. In 2004 she was honoured with a retrospective at the Queens Museum of Ar t in New York, titled 'Joan Jonas: Five Works'. She has also had major retrospectives at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, both in the Netherlands, and Stadtsgalerie Stuttgart, in Germany. Her group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial (1991), New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, US; Long Beach Museum of Art, California, US; Documentas 5, 6, 8, and 11 in Kassel, Germany; and the Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinema et de la Video, Canada, among many others.