James Welling was born in Hartford, Connecticut, USA in 1951. He gained a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the influential art school CalArts (California Institute of Fine Arts), where he studied under artist John Baldessari, alongside contemporaries that included David Salle, Mark Manders and Jack Goldstein. In 1995 Welling moved to Los Angeles to head the photography area of the Art Department of UCLA, where he continues to live and work. Welling’s work is held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art); Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo. Recent solo exhibitions include Picturing the Studio (2009), School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA; New Pictures 3: James Welling (2010), Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, USA; James Welling (2012) The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, USA, and there will be a solo show at Fotomuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland in 2013. Recent group exhibitions include The Pictures Generation, 1974 – 1984, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2009; After Architects, (2010), Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Anti-Photography, (2011), Focal Point and The Beecroft Art Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, UK and 101 Collection: Route 3, (2012), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, USA.