b. 1962, San Francisco

Diana Thater was born in San Francisco in 1962. She received a BA in art history from New York University in 1984 and an MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, in 1990. In 1991, she had her first solo exhibition, Dogs and Other Philosophers, at the Dorothy Goldeen Gallery in Santa Monica. Her 1993 installation at David Zwirner in New York, Late & Soon, Occident Trotting, featured multiple video projections showing manipulated footage of a landscape seen from different viewpoints; the work was based on Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographic series of a horse in motion and evoked the disorienting perspective of Muybridge’s images. This early work presaged recurrent themes and strategies in Thater’s work, such as her interest in the relationships between nature and culture and the interaction between a video projection and its architectural space. China (1995) surrounds its viewers physically with six different projections of wolves being trained to sit still. The Wicked Witch (1996) features a 360-degree shot of a poppy field in out-of-register primary colors. For the 1997 Skulptur. Projekte in Münster, she installed Broken Circle (1997) in the Buddenturm, a twelfth-century tower that is all that remains of the city’s medieval architecture, filling the building with six frenetic projection environments and projecting films onto the windows outside. The multipart installation The best animals are the flat animals (1998) uses zebras to juxtapose abstract two-dimensional imagery (their stripes) with filmic representation (the animals) and installation (video screens of different sizes laid out in a line, one behind the other, to create composite images when viewed from the front and physical depth when viewed from the side). For Knots + Surfaces (2001), an installation at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, the artist filled an entire floor of the building with projections of silent, swirling bees and images of flowers spread across multiple television screens. In recent projects, Thater continues to explore the behavior and intelligence of animals in monumental, multiroom video installations that spotlight gorillas, chimpanzees, parrots, dolphins, and falcons. Her projections of flora and fauna into the gallery space catalyze new musings on the interactions between humans and the natural world.

Thater has had solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel (1996), Portland Art Museum (1996), Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1997), Saint Louis Art Museum (1999), Kunsthalle Bremen (2004) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2007). Her work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial (1995, 1997, and 2006), Biennale of Sydney (1996), Sunshine and Noir: Art in L.A. 1960–1997 at Castello di Rivoli in Rivoli (1998), Carnegie International (1999), Enclosed and Enchanted at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (2000), Moving Pictures at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2002), Nature gaz Kunst at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (2004), Ecotopia at the International Center for Photography in New York (2006), California Video at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2008), and numerous other group shows. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1993), the Franco-American Foundation for Contemporary Art (1995), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). In 2006, she was awarded the James D. Phelan Art Award in Film and Video from the San Francisco Foundation. She is currently based in Los Angeles and teaches at the Art Center College of Design.