Adrian Margaret Smith Piper is a conceptual artist whose work, in a variety of media, focused on racism, racial stereotyping and xenophobia for over three decades; and now investigates the deeper spiritual and ideological pathologies that cause them.

Trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, she is the recipient of Guggenheim, AVA, and numerous NEA fellowships. She has received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculptural Installation and the Bessie Award for New Genres in Dance and Performance. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Gallery of New South Wales, the Musee d'Art Moderne de Ville de Paris, the Fukyui Fine Arts Museum in Kyoto, the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki, Galleria Emi Fontana in Milan, Voges und Deisen in Frankfurt, and the Paula Cooper and Thomas Erben Galleries in New York. Her works are in many important collections.

Two retrospectives, Adrian Piper: A Retrospective 1965 - 1995 and MEDI(t)Ations: Adrian Piper's Video and Audio Works 1968 - 1992 toured the United States from 1999 to 2001, and Prayer Wheel I.1 premiered at the Warhol Museum in March 2001. Her travelling European retrospective, Adrian Piper Since 1965, closed at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona in January 2004. Her two-volume collection, OUT OF ORDER, OUT OF SIGHT: Selected Writings in Meta-Art and Art Criticism 1967 - 1992 (MIT Press, 1996) , is now available in paperback. Piper received her B.A. in Philosophy from the City College of New York and did her M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University with John Rawls. She spent a year at the University of Heidelberg studying Kant and Hegel with Dieter Henrich. Her principal publications are in metaethics, Kant, and the history of ethics. She has recently finished her two-volume project in Kantian metaethics, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception , and Volume II: A Kantian Conception . Two other book projects, Kant's Metaethics: First Critique Foundations and Recognition and Responsibility: Regarding the Other in Germany, Australia and the United States are nearing completion. She has taught at Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, and the University of California at San Diego. The recipient of NEH, Andrew Mellon and Woodrow Wilson Research Fellowships, she has been a Non-Resident Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University since 1994 and was a Distinguished Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in 1998-99.

Following in the steps of trailblazing pioneer Dr. Joyce Mitchell Cook, Piper was the first tenured African American woman Professor in the field of philosophy. She lives and works in Berlin. Piper has studied and practiced yoga since 1965, when she discovered the Upanishads and Swami Vishnudevananda's Complete Book of Yoga. She started studying with Swami Satchidananda in 1966, became a svanistha in 1971 and a brahmacharin in 1985. Since then she has studied at Kripalu with Gitanand and with Arthur Kilmurray, Patricia Walden, Chuck Miller, Erich Schiffmann, Leslie Bogart, Richard Freeman, Tim Miller, David Swenson, Gary Kraftsow, Georg Feuerstein, David Frawley, and John Friend.