Diana Thater

Biography

Diana Thater is a Los Angeles-based artist renowned for her groundbreaking work in film, video, light and sound.

Thater’s work has been showcased in numerous solo exhibitions across the globe. In June 2024, her exhibition Practical Effects opened at LUMA Arles in France, other recent solo exhibitions include ICA Watershed in Boston (2018) and The Mistake Room in Los Angeles (2017), with the latter traveling to Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul and the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. A mid-career survey, The Sympathetic Imagination, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA) of Art in 2015, later traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, cementing her status as a leading figure in contemporary art.

Over the past three decades, Thater’s work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions across the globe.

In 2023, Thater received the Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Art Grant. In 2018, she was awarded the Art + Technology Lab Grant from LACMA. Other accolades include a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2014), the Center for Cultural Innovation’s Artistic Innovation Award (2011), the James D. Phelan Award in Film and Video (2006), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2005), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1993).

Thater’s work is represented in prominent museum collections worldwide, including at MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, The Broad, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, LACMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Thater studied Art History at New York University, before earning her MFA from ArtCenter.

Classes

ART-506-01: Theories of Construction
ART-575-01: 2nd-Year Gateway
ART-699-01: Thesis Continuation
ART-426-01: Theories of Construction