Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954 is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. She is well known for testing the stereotypes of each gender.

Her breakthrough work is often considered to be the collection untitled film stalls, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself evoking typical female roles in performance media (especially art house films and popular movies.

Cindy Sherman is famous for her use of make-up, costumes, props and prosthetics to create complex and ambiguous photographic images. She invents fictitious characters and photographs herself in imaginary situations. Her work #cindysherman will continue to inspire artists around the world for many years to come.

For four decades, Cindy Sherman has probed the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes of art, celebrity, gender, and photography. She is among the most significant artists of the Pictures Generation—a group that also includes Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine and Robert Longo who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with both humour and criticism, appropriating images from advertising, film, television, and magazines for their art. She was a key figure of the conceptual art movement.

Cindy Sherman has always been adamant that her photographs are not self-portraits, even though the photos are of her. In a interview when asked about this she replied with this  ‘I guess technically they’re pictures of me, but not, because I’m doing all these weird things to my face so it doesn’t look anything like me.’ ‘I always want my photographs to be a little off, whether it’s the background not quite fitting in or, in the old work, you’d see the shutter cord, or be able to tell that I’m using fake tits or a fake nose. Everybody knows it’s not real anyway.’