An interdisciplinary painter, Leslie Berns creates mixed-media pieces that explore aspects of social, racial and personal history. Born in Buffalo, New York to parents of German and Jamaican ancestry, she holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from Pratt Institute, both in painting.

'Projects' typically develop from works on/of paper to sculptural objects to spatio-temporal ‘events' documented as moving images and digital prints. She incorporates visual memoir and textual excerpts into book arts-inspired works that enable a narrative, object-based contemplation of key persons, experiences and influences that have shaped her life and art.

In an ongoing work, she alters a copy of James Weldon Johnson’s novella The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Through ‘bookmarking’ key passages in relation to visual language, the content of the book, and her response to it, is conveyed through the metaphorical use of materials.

In Bookmarks for a Mixed Race Narrative: Who Could and Couldn’t Marry Whom, Berns uses wood leveling sticks (shims) coated in mixtures of black oil- and white chalk-pastel to graphically interrogate Anti-Miscegenation Laws of the Several States: 1932, a historic document from the pre-civil rights era.

Recent residencies include a James Weldon Johnson Foundation Fellowship in the Arts (2023) in partnership with Bard College-Simon's Rock (Great Barrington, Massachusetts) and with Arts, Letters and Numbers (Averill Park, New York), The Earth Of, ‘an experiment with language and form for writers and artists' (2020).

Grounding, her video of a choreographed, performative drawing was included in the Washington Project for the Arts Experimental Media Series, and was selected for a screening at the Hirshhorn Museum and the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.). In Germany she presented theater- and dance-based performances in the Heidelberg Schloss Garten (Threshold) and at Unterwegs Theater (Life is Folding and Unfolding).

Formerly a Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at the University of Maryland, College Park, Berns is currently based in Hudson, New York and University Park, Maryland.