Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum was born in New York, USA, in 1946. She studied architecture at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. She then studied video editing at the Video Study Center of Global Village, New School for Social Research in New York, where she graduated in 1976. In 1978, she accepted a teaching position at NSCAD University in Halifax, where she worked with Dan Graham. She also taught at the Städel University of Fine Arts, Frankfurt am Main, DE and Princeton University, New Jersey, New York from 1992 to 1993. Most recently she taught for the MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Dara Birnbaum took part in documenta 7, 8 and 9 (1982, 1987 and 1992) in Kassel, as well as the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Renowned international art institutions have dedicated solo exhibitions to her. She received numerous prizes and awards, including the First Prize for Video at the San Sebastian Film Festival (1983), the Television Image Prize at the XII Festival International de la Video et des Arts Electroniques in Locarno (1991) and the Special Jury Prize at the German Video Art Prize in 1992. Dara Birnbaum lived and worked in New York, where she died in 2025.

The artist is considered a pioneer of media art and dealt intensively with the social and political significance and power of images in the mass media. She critically questioned how women and femininity in general are represented on television.