Diana Thater

Diana Thater (born 1962, San Francisco) is a Los Angeles–based artist whose practice has been central to the development of film, video, light, and sound installation since the early 1990s. Working at the intersection of moving image, architecture, and installation, she challenges conventional ways of experiencing time-based media through immersive environments that engage movement, scale, color, and spatial perception. Her work frequently explores the relationship between the natural world and mediated reality, as well as the complex relationships humans construct with animals and their environments. Thater studied art history at New York University before receiving her MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena in 1990. Across her practice, she has drawn on subjects ranging from animal behavior and the natural sciences to literature and systems of thought, using film and video to investigate perception, subjectivity, and the ways images shape our understanding of the world. Her installations often incorporate the architecture of their exhibition sites, positioning the viewer within rather than outside the moving image. In 2024, Thater presented Practical Effects at LUMA Arles, an immersive installation developed from her research into biomimetic robotics and the relationship between the organic and inorganic worlds. The work followed a primate-like robot situated within a post-apocalyptic garden, extending her longstanding engagement with animals and the changing relationship between humans, technology, and the natural environment. Earlier major presentations include the 2018 exhibition at ICA Watershed in Boston and A Runaway World, first presented at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles in 2017 before traveling to Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul and the Guggenheim Bilbao. In 2015, LACMA organized The Sympathetic Imagination, the artist’s first comprehensive museum exhibition in the United States, which subsequently traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Over the course of her career, Thater has exhibited extensively at institutions including the Aspen Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, Kunsthaus Graz, Natural History Museum London, Kunsthalle Bremen, Dia Center for the Arts, and Secession Vienna. Her work has also been presented in major international exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1993), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2005), a James D. Phelan Award in Film and Video (2006), an award for artistic innovation from the Center for Cultural Innovation (2011), a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2014), and a LACMA Art + Technology Lab Grant (2018). Thater’s work is held in major public collections internationally, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Castello di Rivoli, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Walker Art Center, among others. Alongside her artistic practice, she is a writer, curator, and educator. She has taught at ArtCenter College of Design since 1995 and currently serves as Chair of the Art Department. She lives and works in Los Angeles.