She is a pioneer of video and performance art and one of the most important female artists to emerge in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. She began her career in New York City as a sculptor. By 1968 she moved into what was then leading edge territory: mixing performance with props and meditated images, situated outside in natural and/or industrial environments. Jonas’ works were first performed in the 1960s and 70s for some of the most influential artists of her generation, including Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham and Lauri Anderson. While she is widely known in Europe, her groundbreaking performances are lesser known in the United States, where as critic Douglas Crimp wrote of her work in 1983, “the rupture that is effected in modernist practices has subsequently been repressed, smoothed over”. Yet, in restaging early and recent works, Jonas continues to find new layers of meanings in themes and questions of gender and identity that have fueled her art for over thirty years.