Janine Antoni (born January 19, 1964) is a Bahamian–born American artist, who creates contemporary work in performance art, sculpture, and photography. Antoni's work focuses on process and the transitions between the making and finished product, often portraying feminist ideals. She emphasizes the human body in her pieces, such as her mouth, hair, eyelashes, and, through technological scanning, brain, using it as a tool of creation or as the subject of her pieces, exploring intimacy between the spectator and the artist. Her work blurs the distinction between performance art and sculpture. She describes her work by saying "I am interested in extreme acts that pull you in, as unconventional as they may be" She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Early life and education Antoni was born January 19, 1964, in Freeport, Bahamas. In 1977, she moved to Florida for attending her boarding school. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1986 with a B.A.degree. She received a M.F.A. degree in 1989 in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design. Although she was educated in the United States, her experience growing up in the Bahamas is influential in her work. Her difficulty acclimating to American society is what drove her to use her body as a tool, as she felt her body language made her stand out. Career Tableau vivants, a static scene containing one or more actors or models, are an art form that Antoni has used in her work. In her installation Slumber (1994), Antoni slept in the gallery for 28 days and while she slept, an EEG machine recorded her REM patterns, which she then wove into a blanket from the night gown under which she slept. This particular work was seen as a tableau vivant because of its spectacle aspect:The aspirational focus of this tableau vivant, while situating the artist as an object on view, insists on an aesthetics of connections: between the artist and beholders, between the artists [sic] and the art institutions, and between the artist's conscious and unconscious processes. Antoni explains this desire to be involved in the viewer's experience when she writes:[Performance] wasn't something that I intended to do. I was doing work that was about process, about the meaning of the making, trying to have a love-hate relationship with the object. I always feel safer if I can bring the viewer back to the making of it. I try to do that