Nan Goldin was born in 1953 in Washington, DC. She grew up there and in Boston, where she began to take photographs at the age of 15. In 1978 she moved to New York and then to Berlin where she lived and worked from 1991 to 1993. She currently lives and works in Paris.

Since the early 1970s, Goldin has taken numerous photographs of her friends and 'family', which form a unique corpus of work. She is most famous for her Ballad of Sexual Dependency photographs, a constantly changing slide show of approximately 750 photographs set to music. Goldin's life and friends became the focus of her work - a diary of friends and lovers in Europe and America, in the underground and gay scene.

Since the 1980s Goldin's photographs have been exhibited internationally, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museu Reina Sofia in Madrid.

Guido Costa is a worldwide curator and writer on art and photography, and former collaborator with Nan Goldin on the book, Ten Years After (1996)