Leah Schrager is an artist who works between the web and NYC. In her work she photographs, appears in, augments, and markets her own image. She’s interested in the line, movement, biography, and digital life of the female body. In 2010 she founded a new form of therapy as Sarah White, The Naked Therapist. She co-curated the female-positive BodyAnxiety.com exhibition, which is featured in the April 2015 issue of Art Forum. She graduated in 2015 with an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons, The New School. She is currently engaged in a celebrity-as-art-practice project, ONA (2015-2020), as part of which she has an Instagram with over 400k followers, released her EP “Sex Rock,” had a first year retrospective in February at Superchief Gallery (NYC), held an investors presentation at Johannes Vogt Gallery, and recently published an analysis of “Self-Made Supermodels” in Rhizome.

While most contemporary female artists ignore or critique the male gaze, NYC-based artist Leah Schrager embraces and explores it. Utilizing an open-minded approach to sexuality that fluidly includes its dynamics in her aesthetic investigations, Schrager has both a visual and a conceptual practice. Her visual work involves digitally painting on photographs of herself that are then printed for gallery display. Her conceptual work involves creating and propagating images of herself online in tandem with various “persona” projects. Both practices seek to examine the possibilities of female action and representation in today’s society. In 2010 she founded a new form of therapy as Sarah White, The Naked Therapist, which proved seminal inspiration for her pro-arousal approach to art. She also co-curated the female-positive BodyAnxiety.com exhibition, which is featured in the April 2015 issue of Art Forum. After graduating in 2015 with an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons, The New School, she launched a celebrity-as-art-practice project called ONA, which will run until 2020. Making ONA a real world celebrity has so far included the creation and growth of her Instagram account, which has over 400k real followers, the release of her EP “Sex Rock” and numerous music videos. Prior shows include Johannes Vogt Gallery and Superchief.

Leah has been compared by various journals and journalists (Culturebot.com, Artinfo.com, Jeff Probst, and Abdejt.com) to such seminal figures as Diane Fossey, Marina Abramovic, Marcel Duchamp, Laurel Nakadate, and Sigmund Freud. She and/or her work have been profiled in 1000′s of media outlets, including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Vice, CBS News, ABC News, The NY Daily News, NBC New York, FOX Business News, Playboy Radio, The Huffington Post, Salon.com, The Morning Show Australia, and many others. She has also danced in works by Martha Graham, Trisha Brown, Jose Limon, and Zvi Gotheiner; modeled with Roe Ethridge, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Andrew Tyson and Ben Ritter; choreographed at NY Live Arts, PS 122, On the Boards, 3LD, and 100 Grand; and she has shown her visual and/or performance art at The Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle), McLoughlin’s Kyoto (Japan), Chashama Gallery (Queens), The White Box Gallery (NYC), Bronx Art Space (Bronx, NYC), 25 East Gallery (New School, NYC), The Andrew Edlin Gallery (NYC), and MoMA (NYC). In 2012 she was blackballed by the West Chelsea Artists Open Studios because the director called her a “commercial entity” and “not an artist.” In response she staged her own protest show at the Hotel Americano in Chelsea.