Since emerging in the early 1990s, Los Angeles–based artist Diana Thater 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. Thater studied Art History at New York University, before receiving her MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California.