Marilyn Minter is a painter and photographer born in 1948 in Shreveport, Louisiana, who earned a BFA from the University of Florida and an MFA in painting from Syracuse University before settling in New York in 1976. Encouraged early on by photographer Diane Arbus, she developed a signature process of staging photographs behind manipulated glass, then translating the results into layered enamel paintings that probe glamour, desire, and the body; her 1989 Porn Grid series drew feminist controversy that shaped her later reputation. Minter received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998, and her retrospective Pretty/Dirty toured four museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, from 2015 to 2017. She teaches in the MFA program at New York's School of Visual Arts and is represented by Salon 94 in New York, Regen Projects in Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin in Asia.