Born in Tokyo in 1948, Hiroshi Sugimoto moved to the United States in 1970 to study photography. A multi-disciplinary artist, Sugimoto works in photography, sculpture, installation, and architecture. His work deals with history and temporal existence by investigating through a variety of subject matter issues surrounding time, empiricism, and metaphysics. His art bridges Eastern and Western ideologies while examining the nature of time, perception, and the origins of consciousness. His major series include Dioramas, Theaters, Seascapes, Architecture, Portraits, Conceptual Forms, and Lightning Fields, among others.

Sugimoto has received a number of grants and fellowships, and his work is held in the collections of the Tate Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum of New York, among many others. He won the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2001.In 2006, a mid-career retrospective was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. He received the Photo España prize in 2006, and in 2009 was the recipient of the Praemium Imperiale Award from the Japan Arts Association.

He lives and works in Tokyo and New York.