Leslie Berns's artwork explores aspects of social, racial and personal history through the languages of geometric abstraction and figuration. She creates research-based, interdisciplinary projects that begin as works on, or of, paper, and develop into mixed media sculptural objects and performances. The latter are documented as moving images and digital prints. Her recent works incorporate graphic and textual materials into book arts-inspired pieces intended to enable contemplation of materials as metaphors for racialized identities and experiences within social, historical contexts.

Exhibitions of her work have been held at the Cultural DC Flashpoint Gallery (Wash.,D.C.); The Castleton Downtown Gallery, Rutland, VT; galerie transition (Berlin), Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut/Heidelberg Schloss Garten; RAUM 404/Unterwegs Dance Theater (Heidelberg). Berns’s work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including, Confusing Yourself is a Way to Stay Honest, Kulturpalast Wedding International, Berlin; MIMIC: Works about Replication and Simulation, Manifest Creative Research Gallery, Cincinnati; LINE, Bruce Gallery, Edinboro University,PA; In the Realm of Forms, Pearl Conard Gallery, Ohio State University, the Washington Project for the Arts (Washington, D.C.); and others.

Born in Buffalo, NY (1959) to parents of German and Jamaican ancestry and raised in western New York and southern California, Leslie Berns holds a BFA in painting from Pratt Institute and an MFA in painting from the Yale School of Art.

Based in Hudson, NY, she was formerly a Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at the University of Maryland. She has been awarded residencies with Arts, Letters and Numbers (Averill Park, New York), The Earth Of, ‘an experiment with language and form for writers and artists' (2020) and the James Weldon Johnson Foundation Fellowship in the Arts (2023) in partnership with Bard College-Simon's Rock (Great Barrington, Massachusetts).