Biography

Stanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary media artist. Working primarily in video, with a practice that includes performance, writing, and photography, Kahn's work inhabits a space between fiction and document, and stems from an extensive background in live performance. Integrating the visceral and the improvised with the tightly scored and written, her work addresses issues of agency, power, and the uses and failings of language. Kahn's kinetic relationship to the performative and to humor inform a hybrid media practice infused with pop vernacular, documentary tropes and experimental film/video praxis. Kahn has worked in a collaborative team with artist Harry Dodge, and her work has shown in numerous venues nationally and internationally, including the 2008 Whitney Biennial; 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Sundance Film Festival; Center for Art and Media, Karlsrühe; P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York; Contemporary Center for Art, Vilnius, Lithuania; MIT, Cambridge; ICA, Philadelphia; Kunstalle, Bonn, GDR; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Hayward Gallery, London; Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles. and Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, among many others. Her solo performance works have toured nationally and internationally, and she was a founding member of the performance group/band CORE. Her writings appear in journals and anthologies including Nothing Moments, Userlands (edited by Dennis Cooper), Soft Targets Journal of Art and Theory, LTTR and Movement Research. She teaches as adjunct faculty in New Genres at UCLA, Photo/Media at Cal Arts, Visual Arts/Media and Critical Gender Studies at UCSD, and has taught in the MFA programs at USC and UCLA. Stanya Kahn lives in Los Angeles.