Born 1961 in Liberty New york.Age 16 she dropped out of school and started taking photographs.Living in New york provided the subject matter for many of her works (apartment buildings,store fronts,sidewalks,chain link fencing,graffiti ad boarded up windows.She works primarily with photography and sculpture. She has exhibited widely since the late 1980s and her work has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions including Documenta IX and Docunenta XII and the 1993, 1997 and 2014 Whitney biennials.

Alot of Leonard’s work reflects on the framing, classifying, and ordering of vision. She explained in a recent interview: “Rather than any one subject or genre (landscape, portrait, still life, etc), I was, and remain, interested in engaging a simultaneous questioning of both subject and vantage point, the relation between viewer and world.Basically, subjectivity and how it informs our experience of the world.”

Leonard was active in AIDS advocacy and queer politics in New York in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1992 she wrote “I want a president”, a poem inspired by Eileen Myles’s run for president.

In 1995 she staged an exhibition at her studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan which featured the work Strange Fruit, an installation of various fruit skins (oranges, bananas, grapefruits, lemons) that Leonard saved and then sewed together by hand with wire and thread. Strange Fruit grew out of a deeply personal response to the losses of the AIDS epidemic and as a meditation on mourning, it became a seminal work of the 1990s. Strange Fruit was exhibited in 1998 at the Philadephia Museum of Art , where it currently resides