ArtCenter Talks

About the Author

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas (b. 1960, Vancouver) has created films, photographs, and installations that reexamine particular locations or past events. His works often take their points of departure in local settings, from which broader issues can be identified. Making frequent use of both analog and digital technologies, Douglas appropriates existing Hollywood genres and borrows from classic literary works to create ready-made contextual frameworks for his complex, reimagined narratives that pertain to specific places or historical events. Since 2009, Douglas has been a core faculty member of the Graduate Art Department of ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Jason E. Smith is currently associate chair of the Graduate Art MFA program at ArtCenter College of Design. His writing and research are largely concerned with contemporary art and aesthetics, philosophy, and political thought. He has published in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Inquiry, Parrhesia, Radical Philosophy, and South Atlantic Quarterly, among other journals and publications.

Diana Thater is a Los Angeles-based artist who has created pioneering film, video, and installation-based works since the early 1990s. Her primary emphasis is on the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality, and by extension, between tamed and wild, and science and magic. Thater earned her MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design. She now serves as chair of ArtCenter's Graduate Art MFA program.