Diana Thater has been a pioneering creator of film, video, and installation art since the early 1990s.
16 Facts About Diana Thater
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Since 2000, Diana Thater has been the artist-in-residence for The Dolphin Project, a non-profit organization that protects cetaceans from slaughter, captivity, and abuse.
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In 2009, Diana Thater taught art at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
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Diana Thater's work explores the temporal qualities of video and film while literally expanding it into space.
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Diana Thater is best known for her site-specific installations in which she manipulates architectural space through forced interaction with projected images and tinted light, such as knots + surfaces and Delphine in the Kulturkirche St Stephani and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.
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Diana Thater's stated belief is that film and video are not by definition narrative media, and that abstraction can, and does exist in representational moving images.
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Diana Thater lived for a time at Claude Monet's former home in Giverny, where she filmed videos on her walks in the home's gardens.
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Diana Thater had recently finished her MFA and was living in Los Angeles when Oo Fifi was first shown in 1992, over the course of two shows.
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Diana Thater has said that much of the form of early works like this came from necessity; she was unable to afford screens for the work, so she projected the videos onto a wall in the exhibition space and covered the windows with gels.
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Diana Thater placed the projectors in a way that the viewer's silhouette created due to the projector light can physically be part of the work and interact with the subjects within her footages.
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Diana Thater left out narrations and avoided inserting specific narrative because she believes that animals do not live their lives narratively.
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Diana Thater wanted to show the animals as they are without enforcing human perspective on them.
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Since her first solo show in 1991, Diana Thater has staged many exhibitions in museums and galleries in the United States and internationally.
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In 2011, Diana Thater received an Award for Artistic Innovation from the Center for Cultural Innovation in Los Angeles.
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Diana Thater used the grant to complete Chernobyl, a large-scale installation project which documents the post-human landscape at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant site in Ukraine, marking the 25th anniversary of the explosion in 2011.
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Diana Thater has been the recipient of other notable awards, including the Phelan Award in Film and Video, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an Etant-donnes Foundation Grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.