American artist, Joan Jonas' experimental projects in the late sixties and early seventies were essential to the development of contemporary performance, video, and conceptual art. Born in New York in 1936, she is regarded as a pioneer of video art and performance. Her work fuses video, dance, theatre, sculpture, drawing. Her projects have included collaborations with dancers like Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer and composers like Alvin Lucier. She investigates space, perception and time, ritual gestures, symbolic objects and stereotypes (especially female cliches), and the magical role of the narrator who conveys a drama in each action.

One of the most continuously influential figures of the past half century, Joan Jonas (born 1936) was among the first artists to embrace the forms of video, performance and installation. From her beginnings as a sculptor, and her emergence in the New York art and performance scenes of the 1960s and 70s (including the seminal "Vertical Roll" video piece of 1972, in which the titular television malfunction enacted a memorably fractured female identity), up through her performance at the Performa 09 biennial and recent collaborations with composer Alvin Lucier and the avant-garde theater company The Wooster Group, her work has always been surprising, groundbreaking and necessary. This extensively illustrated volume, containing hundreds of full-color images, presents the definitive collection of Jonas' work. The first career-spanning monograph of the multimedia pioneer, it covers more than 40 years of performances, films, videos, installations, texts and video sculptures. In addition to documentation of the artist's crucial projects, "In the Shadow a Shadow" includes individual essays by Douglas Crimp, Barbara Clausen and Johanna Burton, a major survey text by Joan Simon, and unpublished photographs and drawings from Jonas' archives. This intensively researched and authoritative book documents the range, breadth and depth of one of most prolifically original artists of the twentieth and twenty-first century.