Ann Hamilton was born on June 22, 1956, in Lima, Ohio. She studied geology and literature at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, and then transferred to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, earning a B.F.A. in textile design in 1979. She then moved to Banff, Canada, where her installation ground was briefly on view in 1981, and later to Montreal, where she worked in production sewing at a futon factory. Hamilton returned to the United States to attend Yale University, completing an M.F.A. in sculpture in 1985. While at Yale, she began making photographs of herself interacting with selected objects, a series that she would work on into the 1990s. She presented her first public Performance [more] in 1984, at Franklin Furnace in New York. Hamilton started teaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1985, but quit teaching six years later as she was spending significant amounts of time traveling to undertake installations. In 1992, she established a home base in Columbus, Ohio, where she still lives.

Hamilton has created more than sixty installations, combining sculpture, architecture, video, the spoken and written word, and human presence. Many of her expansive installations have required numerous volunteers to assemble vast numbers of objects; in privation and excesses (1989), for example, 750,000 pennies were laid in honey. In some works, the intensive labor is not completed beforehand, but is instead an essential part of the work on view; in malediction (1991), Hamilton repeatedly molded lumps of bread dough in her mouth and then placed the forms into a basket. In other works, such as her walls that seem to weep tears, inanimate objects convey a living presence.

Hamilton’s preparation for her most complex site-specific installations includes in-depth library research and interviews with community members. Her work indigo blue, part of the 1991 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, included 14,000 pounds of disassembled blue work uniforms, a reference to the plantation crop indigo and Charleston’s history as a center of the slave trade. In whitecloth, on view at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1999, Hamilton used audio recordings, including a Cotton Mather sermon, and manipulation of the museum building itself (such as cutting holes through walls and floors) to make reference to the building’s former uses and to local Puritan history. From the mid-1990s on, Hamilton’s practice of intervening into the architecture of her chosen sites has demanded technological contributions from engineers and a great amount of coordination on her part.

In 1998, Hamilton worked with choreographer Meg Stuart and her company Damaged Goods on appetite, a performance presented at several international venues. The multimedia work Mercy, a collaboration with composer, vocalist, and choreographer Meredith Monk, premiered in 2001.

Hamilton was selected to represent the United States in the São Paulo Bienal (1991) and the Venice Biennale (1999). Her work was included in the Carnegie International in 1991 and 1999. In 1994–95, Hamilton enjoyed a Wexner Center for the Arts Residency Award. The center subsequently developed a mid-career survey of her art, which traveled to several venues. A European survey was presented by the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon in 1997–98. Additional honors include the College Art Association’s Artist Award (1992), the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (1992), and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1989), National Endowment for the Arts (1993), and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1993).