Since emerging in the early 1990s, Los Angeles–based artist Diana Thater (MFA 90 Fine Arts Painting) has pioneered the use of film, video, light, and sound, continually challenging the boundaries of time-based media and installation art. Her work explores the relationship between the natural and man-made worlds while critically examining the structures of mediated reality. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including literature, animal behavior sciences, mathematics, chess, and sociology, her evocative works directly engage their surroundings, producing an intricate relationship between time and space.

Born in San Francisco, Thater studied Art History at New York University, before receiving her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Since 1992, Thater has had 92 solo exhibitions and has been included in over 200 group exhibitions. In June 2024, a solo exhibition of Thater’s work, 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.

Additional institutions that have hosted solo exhibitions of Thater’s work include the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2015); San Jose Museum of Art, California (2015); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2011); Santa Monica Museum of Art, California (2010); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2009); Natural History Museum, London (2009); Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany (2004); Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany (2004); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2001); and Secession, Vienna (2000).

In July of 2025, Thater was awarded a Milestone Grant from the Trellis Art Fund. In 2018, the artist was received an Art + Technology Lab Grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Other notable awards and fellowships include a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2014), as well as an award for artistic innovation from the Center for Cultural Innovation, Los Angeles (2011), the James D. Phelan Award in Film and Video (2006), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2005), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1993).

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

Work by the artist is represented in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Art Institute of Chicago; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California; The Broad, Los Angeles; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; Centre national des arts plastiques, Puteaux, France; CU Art Museum, University of Colorado, Boulder; Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC) Rhône-Alpes, Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, France; Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg, France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; Pinault Collection, Paris; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Sammlung Falckenberg, Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg, France; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Vancouver Art Gallery; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.