The Fall 2026 Graduate Art guest lecture series, organized by Jan Tumlir and Jack Bankowsky.

Patti Podesta + Diana Thater

This event is free and open to the public. RSVPs are not required.

Patti Podesta is a Los Angeles-based production designer for film and television. Over the course of her career as an artist and designer she has become known for her sophisticated aesthetic and intelligent, imaginative work in a variety of genres.

Podesta entered the film business designing title sequences, most notably on Bound (1996). She also was largely responsible for the complex slide-show scene in the original Jurassic Park (1993). Early in her career, she designed Nowhere (1997) for auteur director Gregg Araki. Her spare, moody production work on Christopher Noland’s innovative and critically acclaimed film Memento (2000) put her on the map. More recently, her designs for Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone (2021) and Black Phone 2 (2025) received high praise. Other feature films include Freaky Tales (2024), Love and Other Drugs (2010), Smart People (2008) and Bobby (2006), Emilio Estevez's award-winning account of the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel. Notable projects for television include Defending Jacob (2020), American Gods (2017-21), the oft-praised series Hannibal (2013-15), and Recount (2008), the HBO film which reconstructed the events and milieu of the 2000 presidential election.

Podesta has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy and is a three-time nominee for the Art Director’s Guild Award. In 2012, she designed and co-curated the extensive exhibition dedicated to the work of director Stanley Kubrick for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She holds a master’s degree in fine art and brings this background to her work in film design. She maintains her relation to the art world as a member of the Graduate Art Faculty at Art Center College of Design, where she has taught for 30+ years, advising students working in all disciplines

Among the most important artists to emerge during the 1990s, Los Angeles– based Diana Thater creates groundbreaking and influential works of art in film, video, and installation that challenge the normative ways in which moving images are experienced. Her dynamic installations address key issues that span the realms of film, museum exhibitions, the natural sciences, and contemporary culture through the deployment of movement, scale, and architecture. At the heart of Thater’s work is the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality and, by extension, between the domesticated and wild, the scientific and the fantastical or magical. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including literature, animal behavior, mathematics, chess, and sociology, her evocative layered imagery engages its architectural surroundings to create complex relationships between time and space. A hallmark of Thater’s groundbreaking installations, this nuanced wedding of projected imagery to architectural site literally immerses viewers in her works. Experiencing these installations kinetically, viscerally, and psychically rather than by merely observing passively from a distance, visitors enter into an active dialogue with work that is consistently challenging, disciplined, and intellectually rigorous. (Lynne Cooke, LACMA, 2015.)

Thater studied Art History at New York University, before receiving her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

In June 2024, a solo exhibition of Thater’s work opened at LUMA Arles, France. In 2018, a large solo presentation of her work opened the new ICA Watershed, Boston. The artist’s solo show A Runaway World was first exhibited at The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, in 2017, and later traveled to the Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, and the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain. In 2015, a comprehensive mid-career survey of Thater’s work, The Sympathetic Imagination, was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Additional institutions that have hosted solo exhibitions of Thater’s work include the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2015); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2011); Santa Monica Museum of Art, California (2010); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2009); Natural History Museum, London (2009); Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany (2004); Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany (2004); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2001); Secession, Vienna (2000); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997); The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1997); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (1996); The Kunsthalle Basel (1995) and The Witte de With, Rotterdam (1995.)

In July of 2025, Thater was awarded a Milestone Grant from the Trellis Art Fund. In 2018, the artist was received an Art + Technology Lab Grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Other notable awards and fellowships include a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2014), as well as an award for artistic innovation from the Center for Cultural Innovation, Los Angeles (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).

A prolific writer, educator, and curator, Thater lives and works in Los Angeles. She is currently the Chair of the Art Department at the ArtCenter College of Design, an institution at which she has taught since 1995.

Work by the artist is represented in museum collections worldwide.

Image: Patti Podesta, set design for Gregg Araki, Nowhere (1997) film still / Photo of Podesta and Thater. Courtesy of the artists.

See the full Fall 2026 Seminar schedule here.

Support for this series is generously provided by the following: Jack Shear, Brenda R. Potter, Brendan Dugan, Lisson Gallery, Beth Rudin DeWoody, David Kordansky, Jeffrey Deitch, Gattopardo, Tara Walters, Alan Hergott, and an anonymous donor.

ArtCenter's Graduate Art program is based on intensive studio practice and rigorous academic coursework. The program is distinguished by its low faculty-to-student ratio that provides students with the attention and feedback they need to refine and achieve their artistic goals. Faculty and students are artists working in all genres—film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance and installation. A significant number of alumni have achieved national and international acclaim and often return to share their insights and expertise as visiting faculty and guest lecturers.