Artist Talk: Diana Thater

Los Angeles–based artist Diana Thater has been creating innovative film, video, and installation-based works since the early 1990s. Thater’s multi-layered practice explores the tension between the natural and the constructed, using architecture, color, and both artificial and natural light. Her installations – whether centered on dolphins navigating underwater worlds, honeybees dancing to communicate, or animals surviving in the radioactive landscape of Chernobyl – invite viewers to consider the complex intersections of human, animal, and environmental existence.

Thater was recently awarded a Milestone Grant from the Trellis Art Fund, adding to an impressive list of accolades. In 2024, Thater’s solo exhibition Practical Effects, opened at LUMA Arles, France, where it was on view through May 2025. In 2018, a solo presentation of the artist’s work was held at the 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 her work, The Sympathetic Imagination, was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and later traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

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

Join acclaimed OCMA collection artist Diana Thater in conversation with OCMA CEO and Director Heidi Zuckerman as they discuss the importance of time, what it means to perform with and for an artwork, memory, and human nature.