Lynda Benglis was born in 1941 in Lake Charles, Louisiana. After receiving her BFA from Newcomb College at Tulane University in New Orleans, she studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York. Her arrival on the New York art scene in the late 1960s was a perfectly timed antidote to the male-dominated minimalist and process art movements. Using materials as an extension of her own body, she has created metaphorical and biomorphic forms that explore the physical gesture. Over the course of her career, these materials have included wax, polyurethane, latex, cast metal, marble, glass, and video. Benglis has not been one to shy away from controversy—in 1974, she posed for an exhibition announcement in Artforum wearing nothing but sunglasses and a tan, and holding a giant dildo. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975) and two National Endowment for the Arts grants (1979 and 1990). She maintains studios in New York and India. In 2011 she was given a retrospective by the New Museum in New York.