Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a B.F.A. in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a Certificate in Video and Electronic Editing from the Video Study Center at the New School for Social Research in New York.

Birnbaum's works have been exhibited worldwide. Major retrospectives and survey exhibitions of her work have been held, including at the Belvedere in Vienna (2024), Prada Aoyama in Tokyo (2023), and the Fondazione Prada in Milan (2023). Additional exhibitions were presented at the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York (2022), the Miller Institute of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh (2022), as well as at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves in Porto, Portugal (2010) and the S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, Belgium (2009). Her works were featured multiple times in Documenta (7, 8, and 9).

Birnbaum received numerous awards, including the United States Artists Fellowship (2010), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts Residency (2011), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2011), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021). In 1987, she became the first woman to receive the prestigious Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute for her work in video. In 1992, she was awarded the Special Prize of the International Video Art Prize, presented by ZKM in collaboration with Südwestfunk (SWF).