Renée Green was born in Cleveland, Ohio and studied at SVA in New York and Wesleyan University. She is a professor at the MIT Program of Art, Culture, and Technology at the School of Architecture and Planning. 

Green has had numerous solo exhibitions of her work in venues around the world, including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; Portikus, Frankfurt; Centro Cultural de Bélem, Lisbon; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Secession Building, Vienna; Dallas Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 

Green has also shown work in group exhibitions at many international venues, including: the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; mumok, Vienna; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Museum der Moderner, Salzburg; MACBA, Barcelona; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; International Center of Photography, New York; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen. Green’s work has also been featured in Documenta 11, as well as the following Biennials: the Whitney, Venice, Johannesburg, Kwangju, Berlin, Sevilla, and Istanbul.

Ongoing Becomings, a survey exhibition of 20 years of her work was organized in 2009 by the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne. Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams, a survey exhibition highlighting her time-based work, was organized in 2010 by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. “Le rêve de l’artiste et du spectateur,” a retrospective of Green’s films, took place in 2008 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. 

Pacing, her most recent project, was a two-year engagement with the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University. The project culminated in the spring of 2018 with Within Living Memory, an exhibition inhabiting all public spaces of Le Corbusier’s building in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Green’s books include: Pacing (Cambridge, MA: Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, 2020), Other Planes of There (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams (San Francisco, New York: YBCA/D.A.P., 2010), Ongoing Becomings (Zürich: JRP/Ringier, 2009), Negotiations in the Contact Zone (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2003), Between and Including (Cologne: Dumont, 2001), Shadows and Signals (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2000), Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents (Berlin: DAAD; Amsterdam: De Appel, 1996), After the Ten Thousand Things (The Hague: Stroom, 1994), Camino Road (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofía; Free Agent Media, 1994), World Tour (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993). She has published essays and fiction in Transition, October, Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, Spex, Multitudes, Sarai Reader, and Collapse, among other magazines and journals. Her essays have also appeared in an assortment of international cultural and scholarly books.