Nan Goldin was born in Washington DC in 1953 but grew up in Boston, where she attended the School of the Musem of Fine Arts. She lives in New York since 1978, where she has established herself as one of the greatest exponents of an art in favor of a complete identification between art and life.

Until the age of eighteen uses photography as a "public diary", that is why the work of Nan Goldin is inseparable from his life. Marked by the suicide of her eighteen years old sister Barbara Holly on April 12, 1965, it is photographing her family that she began her photographic career. Later on she will continue to use the family album form for the technique and for the subjects chosen.

In 1979, starting at the Mudd Club in New York, the artist begins to present her images with a slide show accompanied by a punk soundtrack: it is the Ballad of Sexual Dependency shown in the most popular museums in several versions. The photos, even if they give the impression of having been stolen, are never taken with the subject too close to the lens in order to be surprised. One sees his entourage to undergo the labor of life: oldness, love, death, childness succeed in the few seconds of the projection. The group of people close to her, most of which passed away, is seized in a conspiracy orchestrated by the death.

Nan Goldin noted that part of the transgressive and hidden life of the city with an intimate and personal approach. The private memories become works of art only after the decision to expose them. She portrays friends but also herself, as in the famous portrait of herself a month after being beaten. Her style became an icon of her generation and it takes a further turn after the spread of AIDS, which calls into question her faith in the power of image, making clear that her pictures showed only the people who had lost. Goldin gives to her photos documenting the daily lives of his friends living with HIV a function of social and political value and, as activist with ACT UP she organized the first major exhibition on AIDS in New York in '89.

Nan Goldin is part of the group Five of Boston and her work is considered relevant in the context of contemporary photography.