DARA BIRNBAUM
Still From "Mirroring" (1975)
Dara Birnbaum was born in 1946 in New York City where she lived and worked until her recent passing on May 2, 2025. She received two bachelor’s degrees in both Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University and Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a Certificate in Video and Electronic Editing at the Video Study Center at the New School for Social Research. She is most well known for her video art and installation work spanning across five decades. She received many awards during her lifetime, such as an Award in Art by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, United States Artists Fellow Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and she also became the first woman to be awarded the Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute in 1987.
Birnbaum was a pioneering video artist whose experimental work in the late 1970’s and 1980’s transformed video as a medium of art. Her unique ability to express a message by altering accessible media allowed any viewer to critically engage with her work. She leveraged the deconstruction and reconstruction of television shows and movies as a vehicle for critiquing pop culture's imagery of women. Not only was her means of video creation revolutionary at the time, but echoes of her editing techniques of splicing and remixing clips to recontextualize media is still felt through videos across the internet today.
“Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman" (1978-79), Dara Birnbaum
In 1978-79 she created her breakthrough work re-editing scenes from the Wonder Woman television show titled “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman". By freezing time through isolating and repeating clips of explosions and transformation scenes of Diana Prince from her drab role as a secretary into Wonder Woman, Birnbaum highlights the impossible nature of these two extreme identities and it’s reflection in cultural expectations of women. She invites the viewer to reflect on how we have internalized gender representation in media and engage more critically with what paints our cultural landscape by witnessing a concentrated, aberrated version of what we are already familiar with.