Born 1962 in Palmer (Massachusetts), Sean Landers lives and works in New York City. Since the early 1990s, his work has been one of the most fascinating and repeatedly irritating projects in contemporary art. The polar opposites of tormented self-doubt and endless self-aggrandizement run like a thread through the artist's practice along with a number of masks of failure used by the subject as a strategy to preserve himself from impending loser status. With text and video works that appear disguised as conceptual art, he introduces into this genre the taboo of the artist as subject, as well as the artist's emotions. He has become known as the artist who—with confessional and stream-of-consciousness texts and videos—presents himself as a failure in his art, his life and his relationships.