Diana Cooper (born 1964) is an American visual artist, known for largely abstract, improvised hybrid constructions that combine drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and photography. Her art has evolved from canvas works centered on proliferating doodles to sprawling installations of multiplying elements and architectonic structures. Critics have described her earlier work—primarily made with craft supplies such as markers, pens, foamcore, pushpins, felt, pipe cleaners, tape and pompoms—as humble-looking yet labor-intensive, provisional and precarious, and "a high-wire act attempting to balance order and pandemonium." They note parallels to earlier abstract women artists such as Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou, Elizabeth Murray, and Yayoi Kusama. Lilly Wei, however, identifies an "absurdist playfulness and Orwellian intimations" in Cooper's work that occupy a unique place in contemporary abstraction. Cooper has received the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and awards from the Anonymous Was A Woman, Pollock-Krasner and Joan Mitchell foundations. She has been commissioned to create public artworks for New York City and the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, and her work has been acquired by the British Museum and the Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich). Cooper is based in Brooklyn, New York and is married to the scholar and essayist Mark Lilla. Early life and career Cooper was born in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1964 to Ian and Faith Cooper, who were both artists and teachers at private schools. She was drawn to dance and choreography in her youth, but turned to the visual arts while majoring in history and literature at Harvard University (BA, 1986). After graduating, she took courses at the New York Studio School, before earning an MFA in painting from Hunter College in 1997. Cooper began exhibiting doodle-based works on canvas in the latter 1990s. She appeared in group shows at the New Museum and Knitting Factory and gained early notice for solo exhibitions at Ah! Space Gallery (1997) and Postmasters Gallery (1998) in New York. Since then, she has continued to exhibit at Postmasters, and in 2007 received a ten-year retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in 2007. She has also appeared in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum at Altria, MoMA PS1, The Drawing Room (London), SculptureCenter, Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati), Sharjah Art Museum (United Arab Emirates), and He Xiangning Art Museum (China), among others. Since 2008, Cooper has been an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts. Work and reception Cooper is known for her