Leland Ettinger is a multimedia artist and musician raised in San Francisco, California and currently residing in Los Angeles, California. Educated at Rhode Island School of Design and UC Irvine, Leland earned her MFA from Cal Arts.

Her photographic work is obsessional in tone and delves into issues of femininity and female subjugation in a myriad of expressions that are retrospective in nature. The blur of the recent American media past forms a nostalgic entrée into an exploration of constriction, restriction, and disease amongst the genders through a portrayal of a distinctly American female experience.  The visual ephemera of the past in the work provides many cues and clues for inquiry into the shadow side of American gender relations.

The work was commenced in 2001 inside a partnership with artist Leeza Legg in which the two artists posed for each other to express ideas coming through the subconsciousness of both artists. A showing of their collaboration entitled The Escape  Room was mounted at the Eastside Studios  in Hollywood, California in 2005. 

Leland later moved on to working as a  solo photographer and with the dawn of motherhood received another lens to  explore the female journey through.  Leland revisits many iterations and expansions of the same themes throughout her body of work. Different angles and different clichés exploring these themes are tapped for their deeper meanings and associations. The images, like stills from a film, allow the viewer a space of repose and reflection inside them. Ultimately, these images are being gathered together to create an epic narrative in book form.