Joan E. Biren was born on July 13, 1944, in Washington, D.C., and raised in D.C. and the Maryland suburbs. Her parents, Jack and Mona Biren, came from poor and/or working-class Jewish communities in New York before moving to Washington, D.C., for careers in civil service. Over the course of Biren’s and her younger sister Andi’s childhoods, the family came to afford a middle-class lifestyle. Biren became involved in civil rights activism in high school and went on to study political science at Mount Holyoke College. There, she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1966 before pursuing doctoral studies in political science at Oxford University for three years. Toward the end of 1969, Biren returned to the D.C. area, where she became involved in the local Women’s Liberation Movement.

While involved in D.C. Women’s Liberation, Biren met activist Sharon Deevey and began living openly as a lesbian. Biren had known of her sexual preference for women for almost a decade leading up to her coming out in 1970 and had already experienced queer romantic and sexual relationships during her undergraduate studies. Biren also took her first lesbian photograph during the year she came out. Realizing that she had never seen a photograph of two lesbians kissing and resolving to make one, Biren borrowed a camera and photographed herself and Deevey in a kiss.

Soon after making their relationship public, Biren and Deevey attended the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in September 1970, an event organized by the Black Panther Party that brought together the Gay Liberation Front and Third World Gay Liberation Front, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the National Urban League (among others). There, Biren and Deevey met several feminists associated with the New York-based group Radicalesbians, including artist and activist Donna Gottschalk. Resolving to start a radical lesbian feminist separatist commune in D.C., Biren and Deevey ultimately gathered Ginny Berson, Rita Mae Brown, Charlotte Bunch, Nancy Myron, Coletta Reid, and Lee Schwing in 1971 as the Furies Collective. 

The Furies envisioned a mass feminist movement toward liberation rooted in lesbian living and politics. To develop their theory and ideology, they lived communally, separating as much as possible from men and patriarchal social conventions and structures. The Furies shared income, domestic labor, and all property, including clothing; they discussed and negotiated these matters constantly. For the Furies, these intense and intimate conversations led to political and philosophical insights that the collective propagated through poetry readings and theory workshops, as well as the influential The Furies: Lesbian/Feminist Monthly. Published from January 1972 to June 1973, The Furies became an important vehicle of radical feminist thought, particularly understandings of the way personal experience shapes political structures and the role of sexuality in social revolution. 

Biren began photographing for The Furies newspaper and related publications under her initials “JEB.” Inspired in part by her relationship with Gottschalk, Biren also saw that photography offered a way to contribute to the Furies’ philosophy and political outreach without using the skills she honed as a political scientist. Because her facility with rhetoric and argumentation came from her training in elite colleges and graduate schools, Biren had come to associate these skills with patriarchy and economic privilege. Teaching herself how to use the camera and darkroom through a correspondence course and a job at a local camera store, Biren began making portraits of lesbian women and their lives. She published her photographs in The Furies newspaper and sister publications like Motive magazine, Off Our Backs, and the Washington Blade. 

Toward the end of the 1970s, Biren began collecting and selecting her photographs to produce her first photography book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979, reissued 2021). Devoted to showing the capaciousness and diversity of lesbian lives, Eye to Eye included images of prominent lesbian intellectuals such as Barbara and Beverly Smith of the Combahee River Collective; disability activist Connie Panzarino; and D. C. local chef Dot Palmerton. Biren excerpted texts from a similarly diverse range of sources, including poets Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. Joan Nestle of the Lesbian Herstory Archive penned the book’s foreword, and scholar Judith Schwarz provided a short history of lesbian photographers. Quotations from the women photographed accompanied many of the images. 

Eye to Eye is now famously known as the first photography book with the word “lesbian” in the title, and the word was central to Biren’s artistic goals. At the turn of the 1980s, those who lived openly as lesbian, gay, queer, or transgender still faced terrible dangers, including losing employment, losing custody over their children, and institutionalization. Because she insisted on the book’s open affirmation of lesbian identity, Biren developed granular release forms to provide the women she photographed with agency over reproduction and distribution. She self-published Eye to Eye and put considerable effort into finding and convincing a printer to make the book.

Biren also developed her personal research archive of lesbian photographs into the touring slideshow Lesbian Images in Photography, 1850-The Present (also known as The Dyke Show). From 1979 to 1984, Biren presented The Dyke Show in over 80 venues that included feminist bookstores, garages, recreation centers, and academic conferences. Biren’s slideshow offered a history of lesbian photography that included nineteenth-century photographers such as Alice Austen, Frances Benjamin Johnston, and Clementina Hawarden, as well as an ever-growing collection of contributions from Biren’s contemporaries. The show also further developed and propagated Biren’s influential theory of lesbian photography. In asserting the importance of making lesbians visible to becoming and being in community with lesbians, Biren developed her idea of “The Look”: a transformative gaze between women-identifying and women-loving women that can take place through photography. Describing “The Look” in her 1981 essay “Lesbian Photography—Seeing Through Our Own Eyes,” Biren diagrammed it at the center of relationships between photographer, sitter, and audience—relationships formed by and sustaining the actions of creating, sharing, and being in community—in an ongoing relay leading toward social liberation. “All of these things are in continual interaction, mutually validating each other and encouraging further movement into Lesbian existence,” Biren explained (Biren, “Lesbian Photography—Seeing Through Our Own Eyes”).

Biren continued documenting lesbian life and the feminist movement in photographs and slideshows through the 1980s in works such as Look to the Women for Courage: Stories of the Seneca Encampment (1984) and the autobiographical Out of Bounds: A Lesbian Journey (1986). She published a follow-up to Eye to Eye with Making A Way: Lesbians Out Front (1987, reissued 2025), which featured lesbians building communities or working for social change as poets, factory workers, filmmakers, parents, nightclub bouncers, and more. She also contributed her photographs to many publications, including Jewish feminist ones such as Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (1982), edited by Evelyn Torton Beck, and the inaugural issue of Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends in 1990. JEB’s photographs are in the permanent collections of museums including the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, the Getty Museum, and the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.

Biren turned to filmmaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s after transferring her slide show For Love and For Life: The 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights to film. Her film, A Simple Matter of Justice: The 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, not only documented the 1993 March but also participated in it: As the official video producer of the March, Biren set up a live six-camera switch feed that projected footage on jumbo screens located on the National Mall and globally via satellite. Biren also wrote and directed the award-winning documentary No Secret Anymore: The Life and Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon (2003), which chronicled the personal lives and political work of the founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first civil rights organization for lesbians in the United States. Other films explore lesbian health care, women’s shelters, sexual harassment, and justice work.

The first retrospective of Biren’s photography took place in 1997 at the Gelman Library of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Since that time, Biren’s images have appeared in a range of exhibitions across the United States and Europe, including an installation commissioned for the façade of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York for the museum’s Art After Stonewall: 1969-1989 (2019-2022), the traveling exhibition Re/Sisters: A Lens on Gender and Ecology at London’s Barbican Art Gallery and Antwerp’s fotomuseum (2023-2024), and Queer Lens: A History of Photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (2025). Biren worked with curator Ariel Goldberg to digitize The Dyke Show, which became part of the exhibition Images on Which to Build, 1970’s-1990’s (2022-2024).