Judy Chicago (born 1939) was an American artist and activist best known for large-scale collaborative installation artworks--The Dinner Party and The Birth Project--both based on feminist themes and The Holocaust Project--based on the atrocities committed by the Nazi Party during World War II.

Judy Chicago was born Judith Cohen in Chicago, July 20, 1939. She assumed the surname of her hometown in 1969 to assert her independence from the patrilineal convention which gives a woman the surname of a father or husband. The daughter of political activists, her father was a union organizer, and her mother was a professional in a time when women working outside of the home were rare. Chicago studied at the Art Institute of California and later at the University of California at Los Angeles. Married three times, the artist lived and worked in Benicia, California.

Judy Chicago first gained recognition in the 1960s as...