Barbara Bloom was born in 1951, Los Angeles. Lives and works in New York.

Since the 1970s, Bloom has produced works in a wide range of media including photography. Though enthusiastically visual, her artworks seem to stem more from the traditions of literature or film than from the fields of painting or sculpture. Bloom has developed a working method of zeroing in on subjects of interest, and slowly researching - several subjects at a time - savoring all kinds of detours, until a work comes into being. Bloom has an ongoing interest in the value and meaning we collectively and individually bestow upon objects and images. She has not been concerned with showing single objects or images, rather with highlighting the relationships between them, and the meanings implicit in their placement and combination. The objects are placeholders for thoughts, and when they are situated in proximity to one another, meanings can reverberate and ricochet off of each other.
Bloom’s work has been shown widely including exhibitions at: Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Venice Biennale; Kunstverein München, Munich; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; The Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Zürich; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; SITE Santa Fe; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; La Bienale de Venezuela, Caracas; Museum Friedricianum, Kassel; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton; Wexner Center for the Arts; Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum; International Center of Photography, New York; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; The Jewish Museum, New York.