Born in 1951, James Welling received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and currently lives in Los Angeles. Welling has had over sixty solo and group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial 2008 and a mid-career survey in 2000, James Welling Photographs, 1974-1999, that originated at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio and traveled to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Baltimore Museum of Art. His work is in numerous public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.