John Baldessari was born in National City, California. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia until 1990 and is currently a professor of art at UCLA. His work has been featured in more than 120 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe and in over 300 group exhibitions. Awards include the Americans for the Arts lifetime achievement award, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé arts initiative, the Governors Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts in California, the Oscar Kokoschka Prize from Austria, and the Spectrum-International Award for Photography of the Foundation of Lower Saxony. Recent projects include solo shows in New York, Europe, and Los Angeles; books; films; a commissioned project at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin (2004); and retrospectives at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna (2005), the Kunsthaus, Graz (2005), and the Musée d’art Contemporain de Nîmes (2005). Upcoming projects include a curatorial project at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C, as well as two shows in Germany at the Kunst Museum Bonn and the Kunstverein Bonn.