Video Data Bank

Video Data Bank Video art, media art, video art history, artist interviews, and more. https://linktr.ee/videodatabank For more information, please visit saic.edu.

Founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, Video Data Bank (VDB) is a leading resource in the United States for video by and about contemporary artists. The VDB’s collection has grown to include the work of more than 600 artists and 6,000 video art titles. VDB is dedicated to fostering awareness and scholarship of the history a

nd contemporary practice of video and media art through its distribution, education, and preservation programs. The collection is made available to museums and galleries, libraries and educational institutions, cultural institutions and alternative exhibitors through a far-reaching national and international distribution service. Programs and activities include maintaining both analog and digital archives, preservation of historically important works of video art, the commissioning of essays and texts that contextualize artists’ work, the publication of curated programs and artists’ monographs, and an extensive range of public programs, including the popular online streaming program VDB TV. VDB is supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts: Art Works, and by donations from the public. About SAIC

For more than 150 years, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) has been a leader in educating the world’s most influential artists, designers and scholars. Located in downtown Chicago with a fine arts graduate program consistently ranking among the top four graduate fine arts programs in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, SAIC provides an interdisciplinary approach to art and design as well as world-class resources, including the Art Institute of Chicago museum, on-campus galleries, and state-of-the-art facilities.

VDB is excited to share that Dublin's aemi will travel to the Midwest this week for a presentation of their touring prog...
11/12/2025

VDB is excited to share that Dublin's aemi will travel to the Midwest this week for a presentation of their touring program THE SAID AND THE UNSAID on Sunday, November 16 at 6pm at Chicago Filmmakers. Employees Only will welcome VDB artist Frank Sweeney in person!

THE SAID AND THE UNSAID includes work by VDB artists Frank Sweeney and Stephanie Barber, alongside films by Jonathan O’Grady and Maryam Tafakory. The program is curated by aemi, a Dublin-based initiative that supports and regularly exhibits moving image works by artists and experimental filmmakers. aemi co-founder Daniel Fitzpatrick will be in attendance to take part in a Q&A after the screening.

This eclectic program of work shifts from an act of deliberate and playful obfuscation (Stephanie Barber’s 3 PEONIES) to a process of attempted rediscovery as Jonathan O’Grady attempts to navigate a largely inaccessible heritage site (IN SEARCH OF THE FORENAUGHTS LONGSTONE). Elsewhere Maryam Tafakory’s video essay is an uncovering of media artifacts that speak to both deliberate and discrete forms of articulation in the face of censorship (NAZARBAZI) while Frank Sweeney creates a compelling docudrama out of events surrounding the broadcasting ban (FEW CAN SEE). Collectively these works describe a variety of creative means of expression born out of the necessity to speak, however indirectly. Link in bio!

Total Runtime: 76 mins
.o.grady

The screening is co-presented by Employees Only and Chicago Filmmakers. This touring program is supported by Culture Ireland and Arts Council Ireland. Employees Only is an itinerant curatorial project focused on experimental documentary and short-form video from both emerging and established filmmakers in Chicago and beyond.

VDB is pleased to share that Ephraim Asili's 'The Diaspora Suite' (2017) will screen at Barbican Cinema, London, on Nove...
11/10/2025

VDB is pleased to share that Ephraim Asili's 'The Diaspora Suite' (2017) will screen at Barbican Cinema, London, on November 13th.

All five works of The Diaspora Suite will be presented as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival's Jazz on Screen showcase.



"The Diaspora Suite comprises a series of films that explore the connections and shared histories of Black culture and the African diaspora through the filmmaker’s engagement with sites of historical significance across the United States and internationally. Created over the course of seven years, the suite reflects a deeply personal and global perspective.

Jazz plays a central role in the development and conceptualiation of the films. This influence is most explicit in Many Thousands Gone, where Ephraim Asili invited multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee to compose a score in direct response to the film’s imagery. Beyond this collaboration, the suite as a whole is shaped by the rhythms of Asili’s musical influences, striving to translate the power, movement, and energy of African American music and Black diasporic sonic landscapes into a visual language."

Images
1. Fluid Frontiers (2017), Ephraim Asili
2. Kindah (2016), Ephraim Asili
3. Many Thousands Gone (2014), Ephraim Asili
4. American Hunger (2013), Ephraim Asili
5. Forged Ways (2010), Ephraim Asili

11/05/2025

Join us tomorrow evening, Thursday, November 6 at 6pm, for the final CATE program of the season, Laura Huertas Millán: Pharmakon Ecologies.

Laura Huertas Millán’s hallucinatory THE LABYRINTH journeys into the memories of Cristobal Gomez Abel, who worked for drug lords in the Colombian Amazon in the 1980s. Wandering the forest and the ruins of a narco’s mansion—modeled after Dynasty’s Carrington estate—he recounts a harrowing near-death experience.

Millán returns to CATE with a program exploring the coca plant through the lens of the pharmakon—a substance that can both poison and cure. Blending documentary, collaborative ethnography, and speculative fiction, her works reframe colonial legacies, Andean knowledge systems, and ecological violence. Followed by a conversation between Laura Huertas Millán and Claire Pentecost.

Tickets at the link in bio. The program is free for SAIC students with ID.

.art.and.ecology

11/03/2025

Colombian–French artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán returns to CATE on Thursday, November 6 with a program entitled PHARMAKON ECOLOGIES.

Join us for an evening of films tracing decolonial histories, indigenous knowledge, and the coca plant through the lens of the pharmakon—a substance that can both poison and cure.

Followed by a conversation with artist Claire Pentecost, co-founder, Watershed Art & Ecology, and an audience Q&A.

LAURA HUERTAS MILLÁN: PHARMAKON ECOLOGIES
Thursday, November 6
Tickets at siskelfilmcenter.org/pharmakon-ecologies
FREE for SAIC students.
Event includes real-time captions (CART).

Conversations at the Edge is presented with the Siskel Film Center, SAIC Film Video New Media and Animation, and Video Data Bank.

What's new at VDB? Stay up to date on new titles monthly by subscribing to our newsletter at the link in bio.✴Magic Thin...
10/29/2025

What's new at VDB? Stay up to date on new titles monthly by subscribing to our newsletter at the link in bio.

✴
Magic Thinking
Laura Parnes, 2025

Doug, a human optimizer, and Nancy, a meditation class teacher, grasp for certainty in the face of unrest. Their spiritual journey is tainted by hyper-masculine self-help gurus, burned-out ex-climate activists, psychedelic-pushing big tech entrepreneurs, and viciously Darwin-obsessed wellness influencers.

✴
Now That I've Lost My Buffalo, I Don't Know Who To Grind
Jessie Mott, Alejandra Trigoso, Diane Christiansen, 2024

A surreal pageant of grotesque humor and unsettling vitality. Cut-out fragments of animals and humans slip in and out of view, forming and unforming as creatures that vomit, expel, and rearrange their own parts.

✴
The Early Sun, Red As A Hunter's Moon
Adam Piron, 2025

Follows this temporal tradition in an interpolation of Kiowa lore in excerpts from N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain, a reunion in Portugal between the filmmaker and their friend after 20 years, and a historical attempt to decode a cryptic letter from 1890.

✴
A Radical Thread
Jeanne C. Finley, 2025

In the face of environmental threats, a radical back-to-the-land community in the Sierra Foothills races to collectively stitch its 50 years of innovative sustainability into an epic 83-foot tapestry, one tiny stitch at a time.

✴
Acetone Reality
Sara Magenheimer, Michael Bell-Smith, 2025

Animation, found images, and the artists’ own video recordings crash against a dialogue between computer-generated voices exploring the wonders of acetone and the nature of meaning. Blocky pixels, smeared colors, and cryptic iconography constitute an “insane, yet validated reality."

✴
Don't You Like the Green of A?
Nelson Henricks, 2025

Based on the correspondences between letters and colors specific to Joan Mitchell's synesthesia—a condition that Henricks happens to share with her. Made from Joan Mitchell’s associations between letters of the alphabet and certain colors, presented as a more exaggerated combination.

Broad Underground: Black Experimental Moving Image – Friday, October 17, 2025, from 7-9pm. VDB Distribution Manager Emil...
10/16/2025

Broad Underground: Black Experimental Moving Image – Friday, October 17, 2025, from 7-9pm. VDB Distribution Manager Emily Martin will join the MSU Broad Art Museum to present and discuss her curated program on early Black experimental film and video.

The program will feature works by Philip Mallory Jones, Toney W. Merritt, Skip Norman, Howardena Pindell, Barbara McCullough, and Edward Owens. This event is in partnership with the MSU Department of African American and African Studies. Broad Underground is an ongoing collaboration between the MSU Broad Art Museum and the MSU Film Studies Program that presents experimental film, video, and new media and encourages conversation around the topics featured.

VDB is thrilled to welcome Adam Piron to the collection with the acquisition of five works spanning 2020-2025. Piron (K...
10/15/2025

VDB is thrilled to welcome Adam Piron to the collection with the acquisition of five works spanning 2020-2025. Piron (Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and Mohawk) is a Southern California-based filmmaker, writer, and curator. He is a co-founder of COUSIN , a film collective dedicated to supporting Indigenous artists experimenting with and pushing the boundaries of the moving image.

Piron's films have screened at the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA Doc Fortnight, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, and various other festivals and programs. As a curator, he has guest-curated film programs for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Metrograph, TIFF Lightbox, the Autry Museum of the American West, and various other film festivals and venues. His writings have appeared in The Criterion Collection's Current, MUBI Notebook, Cinema Scope Magazine, the Metrograph Journal, and CNN.

Piron's works include The Early Sun, Red As A Hunter's Moon (2025), Black Glass (2024), Dau:añcut (Moving Along Image) (2023), Yaangna Plays Itself (2022), and Halpate (2020).

Images

1. Adam Piron
2. Black Glass (2024) by Adam Piron
3. The Early Sun, Red As A Hunter's Moon (2025) by Adam Piron
4. Yaangna Plays Itself (2022) by Adam Piron

Tune in today, Wednesday, October 15: Artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese — LigoranoReese — will install a sculptur...
10/15/2025

Tune in today, Wednesday, October 15: Artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese — LigoranoReese — will install a sculpture of the word "Democracy" carved in ice on the National Mall at 3rd Street NW between Madison and Jefferson Drives, SW. Last Call – DemocracyICED launches in one hour at 11am CT / 12pm ET with a press conference featuring the artists alongside retired defense experts and spokespeople from faith-based communities who will talk about the impacts of militarization on our society. Cultural, public health, education spokespeople have been invited to talk throughout the day.

You can watch the live stream of the event on VDB's website at https://www.vdb.org/content/now-streaming-last-call-democracyiced, or on meltedaway.com, beginning one hour from now. .us

The sculpture, weighing over 3000 pounds and measuring 17 feet wide, will melt away and disappear during the day. This is the artists' fourth installation of this kind. First staged in 2006 and 2008, these works transform the abstract crisis of democracy into something visible and visceral: massive, solid, and seemingly permanent in the morning, then vanishing into memory by nightfall. DemocracyICED marks the third major artist-driven event of the UP IN ARMS campaign — a four-year effort to expose the dangers of militarizing U.S. society and to transform runaway defense spending into a kitchen-table issue ahead of the 2026 and 2028 elections.

Learn more about LigoranoReese's practice by visiting their artist profile, which includes videos spanning the past three decades and the history of their ice sculptures in The State of Things (2006), A Thousand Cuts (2011), and Truth Be Told (2019).

10/14/2025

As usual, UnionDocs are hosting a fantastic slate of screenings and workshops! Coming up soon is 𝗜𝗧’𝗦 𝗣𝗥𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗟, 𝗜𝗧’𝗦 𝗧𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗟: 𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗧𝗬-𝗕𝗔𝗦𝗘𝗗 𝗗𝗢𝗖𝗨𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗬. Oct 24 - 26.

"Don’t miss your chance to register at a reduced rate with $50 off for 𝗜𝗧’𝗦 𝗣𝗥𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗟, 𝗜𝗧’𝗦 𝗧𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗖𝗔𝗟: 𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗧𝗬-𝗕𝗔𝗦𝗘𝗗 𝗗𝗢𝗖𝗨𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗬 — a 3-day participatory workshop led by artist + educator 𝗧𝗮𝗿𝗮 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗶𝗸 [], whose fearless practice explores how small, tactical gestures can spark movements of solidarity and resistance.

📅 OCT 24 — 26
How can collaborative media-making and embodied resistance challenge systemic erasure?

We’re thrilled to be joined by an incredible lineup of guest facilitators:

🎥 𝗝𝘂𝗹𝗶𝗲 𝗪𝘆𝗺𝗮𝗻 [] — filmmaker (The Tallest Dwarf, Strong!)

📺 𝗗𝗲𝗲𝗗𝗲𝗲 𝗛𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗰𝗸 [], legendary founder of

🏆 𝗧𝗲𝗱 𝗣𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗻 [] — Emmy + Peabody award-winning director and storyteller

Through hands-on exercises, reenactments, and collective strategy-sharing, participants will imagine how our bodies themselves become sites of resistance, connection, and joy."

Seats are limited. Get tickets at the link in UNDO's bio and reach out to them for a special discount code!

10/14/2025

How can Black experiences be represented in experimental film, video, and new media?

Join Emily Martin, distribution manager at the Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for a curated screening and discussion at Broad Underground: Black Experimental Moving Image on Friday, Oct. 17, from 7–9pm at North Kedzie Hall Student Café, Room N219. Learn more + register for free at broadmuseum.msu.edu/events/broad-underground-black-experimental-moving-image

This event is in partnership with the MSU Department of African American and African Studies.

10/14/2025

"Join the artists and game developers of KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO — Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and Ben Babbitt — for a one-of-a-kind evening of live performance, unique scene tours, and rare materials from the game widely regarded as one of the most significant of the past decade.

Followed by a conversation and audience Q&A with the artists, moderated by James Connolly.

“One of the most thoughtful, heartbreaking and yet fantastical looks at modern life in America.” —Todd Martens, LA Times

“KRZ really is the masterpiece critics have been lauding it as for years.” —William Hughes, AV Club

Presented in partnership with of Chicago Year of Games

Thursday, October 16, 6:00 p.m.
Tickets are going fast — get yours at 🔗🔝
✨ FREE for SAIC students.✨
This event will include real-time captions (CART).

Tickets are going fast — get yours at 🔗
Conversations at the Edge is a collaboration between the Siskel Film Center, SAIC Film Video New Media and Animation, and Video Data Bank.

An Evening with Vaginal Davis, at MoMA on Monday, October 13 at 7pm. Hosted on Floor T2/T1, The Roy and Niuta Titus The...
10/09/2025

An Evening with Vaginal Davis, at MoMA on Monday, October 13 at 7pm. Hosted on Floor T2/T1, The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2.

In Glenn Belverio's One Man Ladies (1996), Glennda Or**sm is joined by Vaginal Davis as they meet women on the streets of New York City to discuss Laura Schlessinger's book Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives. The pair humorously explore the best ways modern women can find and secure a husband.



"Join us for a special edition of Modern Mondays, in conjunction with the MoMA PS1 exhibition Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product. Featuring videos from nearly four decades of Ms. Davis’s practice, this Modern “Make Out” Mondays evening spans from the self-proclaimed Blacktress’s beginnings making videos and music in the queercore scene of 1980s Los Angeles to her early visits to Berlin, where she permanently relocated in 2005 and still lives today.

That Fertile Feeling (1983) is an early marker of Vaginal Davis’s satirical approach to race and gender. Starring Ms. Davis and her Afro Sisters bandmate Fertile La Toyah Jackson, the no-budget parody finds the two in trouble when Jackson’s water breaks and she has to give birth to “eleven tuplets.” Ms. Davis’s incisive, irreverent wit extends across the program in Dot (1994), her “treatise on bad acting,” and Mary Magdalene (1999), a trailer for her infamous send-up The White to Be Angry (1999).

Videos such as One Man Ladies (1996), an episode from Glenn Belverio’s cable access television show Glennda and Friends, and Berlin Stories (2001–06) highlight Ms. Davis’s global collaborative network, while later videos made on her cellphone are compelling calls back to the United States through a brief peek into her studio and a rally for action."

Address

School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago, 36 S Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL
60603

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

Telephone

+13123453550

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Video Data Bank posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Establishment

Send a message to Video Data Bank:

Shortcuts

Share

Category