Kathy High

Kathy High is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working with time-based arts and biology. In the early 1980s she studied for her masters in film and video at University of Buffalo with media pioneers Hollis Frampton, Steina Vasulka, and Tony Conrad. She produces sculptures, videos, performances, and installations about gender and technology, empathy, and animal sentience. She is a scholar of the history of video technologies and video systems and art. In the last ten years she has been working with living systems, animals, and art, considering the social, political and ethical dilemmas of biotechnology and surrounding industries.

She has received awards from organizations including the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts. Her art works have been shown at the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, and Exit Art (NYC), UCLA (Los Angeles), Science Gallery, (Dublin), NGBK (Berlin), Fesitval Transitio_MX (Mexico), MASS MoCA (North Adams), and Videotage Art Space (Hong Kong). She has had artist residencies with SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia (2009-10), and in Hong Kong with the Asian Arts Council (2005).

Highhas had artist residencies with the Finnish Society of Bioart as part of the Field Notes/Deep Time/Journey to the Post-Anthropognic at the northern Kilpsjarvi Biological Research Station (2013), with SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia (2009-20), and in Hong Kong with the Asian Arts Council (2005).

She hosts bio/ecology+art workshops and is creating an urban nature center in North Troy (NATURE Lab) with media organization The Sanctuary for Independent Media. High is Professor of Video and New Media in the Department of the Arts, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. - a department specializing in integrated experimental arts practices. She teaches documentary and experimental digital video production, history, and theory, as well as classes on science and art. Her  book The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued (co-edited with Sherry Miller Hocking, assistant director of the Experimental Television Center, and Mona Jimenez, Associate Professor of the Moving Image and Preservation Program in Cinema Studies at NYU) was published in 2014 by Intellect Books (UK)/Chicago University Press (IL). The work presents stories of the development of early video tools and systems designed and built by artists and technologists during the late 1960s and 70s, and how that history of collaborations among inventors, designers, and artists has affected contemporary tool-makers.