Tom Otterness (born 1952) is an American sculptor born in Wichita, Kansas, widely regarded as one of the country's most prolific public artists. He arrived in New York in 1970 to study at the Art Students League, and in 1973 participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

His work is characterized by cartoonish, button-faced bronze figures that engage themes of class, wealth, power, and capitalism with a combination of whimsy and political critique, drawing on Depression-era cartooning and pop art traditions. In the late 1970s he became an active member of Colab (Collaborative Projects), an interdisciplinary collective of New York artists, and participated in the group's celebrated 1980 Times Square Show.

In 1987 he exhibited The Tables at the Museum of Modern Art's Projects series, a work featuring bronze blue- and white-collar figures arranged on picnic tables in the sculpture garden. Among his most celebrated public commissions is Life Underground (2001), a permanent installation of over one hundred small bronze figures — including alligators and characters carrying money bags — throughout the 14th Street/Eighth Avenue subway station in New York, commissioned by the MTA's Arts for Transit program. In 2004, Tom Otterness on Broadway installed twenty-five works along Manhattan's Broadway corridor from Columbus Circle to 168th Street before traveling to Indianapolis, Beverly Hills, and Grand Rapids.

Otterness also attracted significant controversy for Shot Dog Film (1977), a work in which he filmed himself shooting a dog, which sparked public protest and led to the cancellation of at least two major public commissions decades later.

His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, among others. He lives and works in New York.