Liz Cohen

Liz Cohen (born 1973) is a performance artist and automotive designer. Cohen has an MFA in photography from California College of the Arts and Crafts, (now the California College of the Arts), where she has taught. She currently teaches at Cranbrook Academy of Art and lives in Detroit, Michigan.

Cohen grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, a first-generation American of a Colombian Jewish family. She attended college at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts as an economics major. She graduated with a dual major in philosophy and ethical theory and studio art.

Cohen is most notable for her Bodywork project to transform an East German 1987 Trabant automobile into a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino using gears and hydraulics. As part of the project, Cohen hired a personal trainer and dieted so she could appear in a bikini to be the model for the car at lowrider shows and for a series of photographs used to promote and document the project.

Photographs from the project have been shown at solo shows at Fargfabriken in and Galerie Laurent Godin in Paris as well as numerous publications, including the cover of German culture magazine Sleek (Winter 2006/2007 issue) and the November 2007 issue of The Believer. The car was outfitted with motion sensors, cameras and projectors to create an interactive exhibit. The project and its documentation was financed primarily through a 2005 grant from Creative Capital.

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