b. 1975, San Francisco

Slater Bradley was born in San Francisco in 1975. He received a BA from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1998. Bradley's photographic series Don't Let Me Disappear (1997–2003), titled after a line spoken by Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, is replete with autobiographical references, personal symbols, and artistic and musical influences. In JFK Jr. (1999), the camera voyeuristically shadows a young girl waiting her turn to place a flower in memory of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy; the mourner remains unaware of the filmmaker's stare until the final frame. Bradley likens his art to butterfly collecting in the video I Was Rooting For You (Butterfly Catcher at Home) (2000). In The Laurel Tree (Beach) (2000), actress Chloë Sevigny recites a passage on art from Thomas Mann's novella Tonio Krögor. Female Gargoyle (2000) presents a woman standing precariously close to a building's ledge. The video Theory and Observation (2002) muses over the relationship between reason and faith through images of a chorus singing in the Notre Dame Cathedral and excerpts from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

For his best-known work to date, The Doppelganger Trilogy (2001–04), Bradley staged concerts by three fallen heroes of the pop music world—Joy Division's Ian Curtis, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, and Michael Jackson—performed by the artist's veritable double, Benjamin Brock. Since the artist met Brock in a nightclub in 1999, Bradley has repeatedly employed him in various guises in his photographs, videos, and drawings, reflecting on the complicated notions of duplicated and erased identities. In the video The Year of the Doppelganger (2005), Bradley casts Brock in the role of a skinny rock musician playing his drum set so intensely that he remains unaware when his empty football field is usurped for the team's practice. In Uncharted Settlements (2005), Bradley, Brock, and a plethora of fans are unrecognizable beneath their Star Wars costumes, a situation characterized by both anonymity and community. The film My Conclusion/My Necessity (2005–06) surveys Paris's Père-Lachaise Cemetery, eventually capturing a young girl applying a lipstick kiss to Oscar Wilde's gravestone. Brock appears in an astronaut suit wandering the Museum of Natural History in New York to Beethoven's “Moonlight Sonata” in Dark Night of the Soul (2005–06), recalling Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. For two recent videos, Bradley filmed on Roosevelt Island and addressed filmic history; in The Abandonments (2005–06); he restaged Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain and in Blackwell's Island (1903/2007) he juxtaposed his own 2007 footage with that of the footage Thomas Edison shot in 1903.

Bradley has been featured in solo exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York (2000), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2005), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2005), and Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2007), among others. His work has also been included in major group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial (2004), video-musica-video at Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid (2005), and Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2007). In 2005 he was awarded The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in Video. Bradley lives and works in New York.