Alison Cornyn is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work often incorporates oral history, public memory, and archives. Her work revolves around social justice and often focuses on the criminal justice system. Her projects have received numerous awards including the Peabody Award, the Gracie Allen award for Women in Media, the Online News Association’s award for Best Use of Multimedia, Pew's Batten Award for Innovation, the National Press Club Award, as well as the Webby Award for net.art.

She is founding partner and Creative Director of Picture Projects, a Brooklyn-based studio that produces in-depth new media projects about some of the most pressing social issues of our day with a focus on investigating complex stories from multiple perspectives. Often merging art, photography, media, technology, and journalism, the studio creates engaging environments, both online and as physical installations. Her project, Incorrigibles, (incorrigibles.org) examines youth justice for girls – past and present, starting in New York. In 2011 Cornyn founded the Prison Public Memory Project (prisonpublicmemory.us). She is also Creative Director of the Guantanamo Public Memory Project (gitmomemory.org) and States of Incarceration (statesofincarceration.org) through the Humanities Action Lab currently based at Rutgers University and formerly at The New School.

As a TED Resident she was examining how language has shaped the ways in which we define and confine young women over the last 100 years (www.ted.com/talks/alison_cornyn_rediscovering_wayward_girls). Alison is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, Design for Social Innovation MFA program and has taught at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), in the art department at City College, conducted workshops on multimedia storytelling and guest lectured at the Sundance Film Festival, Montreal Film Festival, IDFA in Amsterdam. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.