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Sara
Diamond is a television and new media producer/director, video artist,
curator, critic, teacher and artistic director who has represented
Canada at home and internationally for many years.
Diamond is responsible
for developing the artistic and professional development direction
of Media and Visual Arts, developing research perspectives, Banff
New Media Institute workshops and think tanks, co-productions, artists'
residencies and partnerships, and work study opportunities in key
areas. She is also responsible for the publishing initiatives of
Media and Visual Arts and the Walter Phillips Gallery as well as
collaborations with the Aboriginal Arts program and other departments
of the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Executive
Producer Television and New Media Coproductions
At The Banff Centre, Diamond acts as Executive Producer and
Producer on numerous independent video and interactive media projects
including: "Dreams of the Night Cleaners" by Leila Sujir,
"Fast Trip Long Drop" by Gregg Bordowitz, "Aboriginal
PSA's" with the Alliance, "Silent Tears" by Shirley
Cheechoo, "Mauve" by Adriene Jenik, "The Secret",
by Douglas Cooper, "Conversation with Angels" by Merja
and Andy Best, a series about women and art practice for the Women's
Television Network, "Men", by MJW Dance Company, "Herr"
by Jon Greyson, an aboriginal dance series and over one hundred
other projects
She works to
integrate television and video environments with visual arts and
build the new media creation program. Among her accomplishments
at the Centre, Diamond developed and implemented artist based video
practice, television co-productions of artists' works in video and
video installation support. She has been active in script development,
critics' residencies, artists' Internet projects (NOMAD NET) and
new media research consulting for authoring tools and interactive
media.
Banff New
Media Institute
Diamond also created the Banff New Media Institute (formerly
the Multimedia Institute) in the Media and Visual Arts department,
which offers a year long series of think-tanks, summits and workshops.
Through the New Media Institute, she has created critical theory
and strategic planning events for new media including "Flesh
Eating Technologies," "Desiring the Death Machine,"
"New Materialism," "Avatars! Avatars! Wherefore Art
Thou," "Out of the Box, into the Future of the Interface,"
"Big Game Hunters," and "Producing New Media: Money
and Law." She is responsible for fund-raising as well as partnerships
for the New Media Institute and responsible for developing all new
media creative presentations.
Walter Phillips
Gallery
Committed to exploring new forms, she created a prototype development
environment for interactive media projects and continues to curate
one or two major exhibitions each year at the Walter Phillips Gallery
for contemporary art at The Banff Centre. The exhibitions usually
relate, or involve, interactive media components and a thematic
creative residency running at the Centre. Diamond is also a key
contributor and creator of the New Media Focus strand of programming.
Work outside
Banff Centre
Her own television productions include The Lull Before the Storm,
On To Ottawa, and Fit to Be Tied. In 1992, Diamond was honoured
with a retrospective exhibition and catalogue at the National Gallery
of Canada, following a retrospective at the 1991 IMAGES Festival
in Toronto and a solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She
often represents Canada internationally at events like Biennial
in Sydney, Australia, the Festival of the Arts in Budapest, Hungary,
Northern Lights in Tokyo, Japan and Exploding Cinema in Rotterdam,
the Netherlands. She has had many solo exhibitions including Paternity,
an installation commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery, which
is now in the permanent collection of the National Gallery.
Her videotapes
have been screened in galleries, festivals, classrooms and community
events all over the world. They have been collected by diverse institutions
such as the Art Bank, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery
of Canada, the School of Cinema and Television and many universities,
college, libraries, school boards and other organizations.
Diamond has
won numerous awards for her videos including Keeping the Home Fires
Burning, The Lull Before the Storm and Ten Dollars or Nothing. She
was awarded the Gold Medal in History by Simon Fraser University
in 1990 and has won awards from the Canada Council, British Columbia
Film, British Columbia Culture and various others. One of her most
recent honours is the 1995 Bell Canada Award for excellence in video.
She was nominated British Columbia Woman of the Year while residing
in Vancouver and is included in Canada's Who's Who.
Diamond is a
curator, critic and writer, curating many video and art exhibitions,
and writing for diverse publications and anthologies on the history
of video art, current issues in new technologies, sexuality and
censorship, and social history. She has recently completed a history
of computer arts in Western Canada and is writing a text on French
theory, new media and North American cultural analysis.
She has served
on many boards and juries, such as the l996 Chalmers documentary
award jury, the Canada Council Media Arts Advisory Committee, the
l996 and l997 International Multimedia Awards. She chaired the tri-national
arts panel between Mexico, Canada and the United States and has
recently served on the Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundation juries
and the Governor General Awards jury. Diamond has sat on many boards,
including that of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Satellite Video
Exchange Society and FUSE Magazine. She was a representative on
the federal task force on training for the cultural sector and an
alternate on the task force on the rights of the artist, a consultant
to the Minister of Canadian Heritage on new media and serves on
the SAGIT Secretariat (Cultural Industries Sectoral Advisory on
Trade).
Lecturer
As a teacher and lecturer, Diamond leads workshops, lectures
and short courses for many post-secondary institutions and art centres.
For more than eight years she served as faculty in studio and critical
studies at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver.
She has also taught at the Capilano College Labour Studies Program
and the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.
She has acted
as an advisor to university programs including the York Film School
review and the Technical University of British Columbia. She recently
consulted with the federal government of Canada in exploring directions
for content creation in new media. She speaks regularly at international
multimedia industry conferences such as MILIA, consults with the
communications industry on issues of content and delivery and is
a regular presenter, curator and consultant for artists' new media
events. She was recently made a member of the Academy of Canadian
Cinema and Television.
Research
In recent years, she has worked increasingly with research and development
projects in software, has consulted in developing interactive media
curriculum and events and has created think tanks that bring together
cultural industries, new media content producers, artists and investors.
She has consulted with Brazilian, Cuban, French and other international
professional development environments to present interactive media
seminars, conferences and exhibitions and served on the l998 SIGGRAPH
panels committee. She currently sits on several Ph.D. thesis committees
for the University of Calgary and is a member of the advisory council
for the development of the Technical University of British Columbia.
Diamond is also a visiting professor at UCLA.
She has led
research in authoring tools (JAVA client side software, music and
3D imaging) and is currently leading research in advanced design
of visualization environments. She contributes to peer review journals
in the fields of Media and Communications Studies and sits on the
editorial board of peer review journals such as Convergence. Her
writing addresses issues of technology, art, women's studies, sociology,
law and media art history. She is currently co-editing publications
about linguistics, games (The Banff Centre and University of Texas
at Austin), science and art.
She was born
in New York City and has resided in Western Canada since 1978. She
is currently the Executive Producer for Television and New Media
and the Artistic Director of Media and Visual Arts at the Banff
Centre for the Arts.
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