Cindy Bernard has a career that spans nearly three decades. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, California Arts Council, Creative Capital, Anonymous Was a Woman, the Harpo Foundation, California Community Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Japan, and was included in the Whitney and Lyon Biennials.

In addition to her visual practice, Bernard takes an active interest in the spaces and production of social exchange. In addition to founding SASSAS, she was a director and advisor to Foundation for Art Resources from 1985 to 1990, a founding director of the Coalition for Freedom of Expression, and co-founder of MOCA Mobilization.

Her current project is Vinland, a meditation on the complex and continually shifting relationships between spaces, social and economic structures, and personal and collective histories, centered in two small communities in Newfoundland.

Bernard is a Professor of Graduate Fine Art (Adjunct) at Art Center College of Art and Design and was appointed the inaugural Ruffin Distinguished Artist-In-Residence at the University of Virginia for the academic year 2013/2014. She was a 2015 MacDowell Fellow.