Bill Viola

Bill Viola is an American video artist and contemporary artist. He was born in 1951 in New York, and began his formal artistic training in 1972 at the College of Visual and Performing Arts in Syracuse, New York. He went on to study electronic music and video at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and then in 1975 he moved to Santa Barbara, California to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Viola has been producing video works since 1971, and his work has been featured in a number of international exhibitions and collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Venice Biennale. He has also had solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Viola's work combines elements of electronic music, video, photography, and live performance. His work has been described as a "meditation on the possibilities of video as a medium for personal expression, as well as a celebration of the beauty of the natural world". He is best known