Leslie Friedman was born in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, in 1981 and while she currently lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, her roots as a Providence Printmaker continue in her sometime used nickname “LesliePVD.” During the summer of 2002, Leslie learned how to silkscreen in the basement printmaking workshop of the lauded arts non-profit, AS220. While a student and for a number of years afterward, Leslie made a number of gig posters, particularly for local bands like Zox, Holiday., and the Lingo. She received a BA in Political Science from Brown University in 2005 where she concentrated her studies in political theory and civil liberties.

From 2005 to 2007, Leslie Friedman lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and built a printmaking studio in the historic neighborhood of San Telmo. She describes these years as fundamental to her maturation from poster maker to print artist. In the Fall of 2009, she began an MFA program in printmaking at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia.

For the next seven years, Leslie made Philadelphia here home. In 2011, Leslie graduated from the MFA program and founded a collectively-run project space in Philadelphia’s Chinatown neighborhood called NAPOLEON, which has, on average, ten artist and curatorial members.  In 2012, Leslie was named a fellow at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA) in their Career Development Program. Leslie was a winner of the Fleisher Wind Challenge in 2014 in the sculpture category.

In the summer of 2016, Leslie became a “damned yankee” and moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to accept an assistant professor position at Louisiana State University in Printmaking and Foundations. She is a current member at the pioneering St. Claude arts district artist collective Good Children in New Orleans. She has been a visiting critic at institutions such as Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and the University of Arkansas, and participated on a number of panel discussions, including SGCI‘s 2017 most-talked-about panel Co-terminous: Sculpture and Space through Print, organized and moderated by Patrick Vincent, and including Tonja Torgerson and Camilla Taylor. Over the last ten years, Leslie’s work has been shown nationally and internationally, including countries like Korea, China, and Australia.