Steina |
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
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Steina was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1940. She
studied violin and music theory, and in 1959 received a scholarship
from the Czechoslovak Ministry of Culture to attend the State Music
Conservatory in Prague.
Woody and Steina married in Prague in 1964, and shortly thereafter
she joined the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. After moving to the
United States in 1965 she worked in New York City as a freelance
musician. She began working with video in 1969, and since then her
various tapes and installations have been exhibited in USA, Europe
and Asia. Although her main thrust is in creating Video Tapes and
Installations she has recently become involved in interactive performance
in public places, playing a digitally adapted violin to move video
images displayed on large video projectors.
In 1971 she co-founded The Kitchen, an Electronic Media Theater
in New York. Steina has been an artist-in-residence at the National
Center for Experi-ments in Television, at KQED in San Francisco,
and at WNET/Thirteen in New York. In 1988 she was an artist-in-residence
in Tokyo on a U.S./Japan Friendship Committee grant. She has received
funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American
Film Institute and the New Mexico Arts Division. She received the
Maya Deren Award in 1992 and the Siemens Media Art Prize in 1995.
In 1993 she co-curated with Woody the exhibition and catalogue,
Eigenwelt der Apparatewelt (Pioneers of Electronic Art) for Ars
Electronica in Linz, Austria. In 1996 she served as the artistic
co-director and software collaborator at STEIM (Studio for Electronic
Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam. In 1996 Steina and Woody showed
eight new media installations at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, an exhibition repeated in Santa Fe a few months later. Her
installation, titled Orka was featured in the Icelandic Pavilion
at the 1997 Venice Bienale. In 1999 she showed three installations
in three countries: "Nuna" in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
"Textures" in Reykjavik, Iceland and "Machine Vision"
in Milano, Italy. She created two installations for the Art Festival
2000 in Reykjavik, Iceland. In 2001 she was invited to festivals
in Norway, Russia, Estonia, Portugal, Montreal, England and Italy.
Between July and October of 2002 she realized four installations
in four locations in her hometown of 22 years, Santa Fe, NM |
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