Photo by Carrie Dashow/Olivia Robinson KATHY HIGH is a visual/media artist, independent curator, and educator. She produces videos and installations posing queer and feminist inquiries into areas of medicine/bio-science, science fiction, and animal/interspecies collaborations. Her areas of interest are video art, new media arts, video/media art preservation and history, experimental and documentary filmmaking, feminist studies, bio-arts and living science and arts intersections.

Her video works touch on body politics, and have been shown in galleries and museums nationally and internationally, including the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern art in NYC, Catalyst Arts, Belfast, Ireland, Time Based Arts, Hull, U.K., Videotage Art Space, Hong Kong, as well as aired on PBS. She received awards for her media works from the Rockefeller Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. As a curator, she started the video exhibition program at Hallwalls Gallery in Buffalo, NY, curated the Microwave festival in Hong Kong, and also the television series “Reel New York”, for WNET/Thirteen, NYC. Her installation work, “Embracing Animal” www.embracinganimal.com was exhibited in “Becoming Animal” exhibition at MASS MoCA, North Adams, curated by Nato Thompson. In summer, 2005, High was awarded a three-month artist-residency in Hong Kong sponsored by the Asian Cultural Council and the Hong Kong Art Center. There she exhibited “Big Tools, Small Tools” with Melissa Dyne at Para-Site Gallery and taught that the Hong Kong Art School. See Video Data Bank for information on video work by K.High: www.vdb.org.

High is Head and Associate Professor of Video and new Media at the Department of Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, a department specializing in integrated electronic arts practices arts.rpi.edu. She teaches digital video production, history and theory and has been working in the area of documentary and experimental film, video and photography for over twenty years. She has also recently started the BioArts Initiative at Rensselaer, a collaboration between the Arts Department and the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, with Robert J. Linhardt, Acting Director of CBIS (PI), Kathy High, Head/Arts (Co-I), Rich Pell, Faculty/Arts (Co-I), This BioArts Initiative will promote exhibitions and artist residencies that will encourage collaboration and dialogue between these two areas of art and biotechnology.

She was also the founder and editor of the media arts publication FELIX: A JOURNAL OF MEDIA ARTS AND COMMUNICATION since 1991 www.e-felix.org. The most recent issue was a collaboration with Mexican media artists called RISK/RIESGO that addressed issues of the perils of creating cultural critique at this particular moment of censorship and cultural lockdown. This bilingual issue of FELIX (representing over 60 artists from US and Mexico, published in Spanish and English) was accompanied with a compilation DVD published sampling video works by the over 25 artists. An upcoming publication entitled “TOOLS: Video Machines and Media Arts Histories” with co-editors Sherry Miller Hocking (Experimental Television Center) and Mona Jimenez (NYU, Moving Image Arching and Preservation Program) looks at the history of tools used in creating media arts such as video synthesizers, and the collaboration between artists and engineer designers, and the preservation of these tools. The basis of this project comes out of the archives of the Experimental Television Center (www.experimentaltvcenter.org), a seminal 35 year old media arts organization which has dramatically influenced the field of media/video arts.