Dara Birnbaum

An architect and urban planner by training, Dara Birnbaum studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the San Francisco Art Institute. She began using video in 1978 while teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she worked with Dan Graham. Recognized as one of the first video artists to employ the appropriation of television images as a subversive strategy, Birnbaum describes her early video tapes as "attempts at slowing down 'technological speed' in order to arrest movements of TV-time for the viewer".