Sharon Louden was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1964. She holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Drawing Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Weisman Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
Louden's work is held in major public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, Arkansas Arts Center, Yale University Art Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
Her work has also been written about in the New York Times, Art in America, Washington Post, Sculpture Magazine, ARTnews and the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as other publications.
In addition, Sharon Louden is a Senior Critic at the New York Academy of Art and the editor of Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists. Louden is currently working on a second book entitled, The Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life, which will be published in early 2017 by Intellect Books and distributed by the University of Chicago Press.