About Kathy High
Kathy High was a former student of Steina’s and is an interdisciplinary artist working with technology, art, and biology. She produces videos, photographs, writings, performances and installations about gender and technology, empathy, and animal sentience. In the last ten years she has become interested in working with living systems, animals and art, considering the social, political and ethical dilemmas of biotechnology and surrounding industries. Her most recent art works include a video documentary about green or natural burials, entitled Death Down Under; and a performance/visual arts project called Blood Wars that uses white blood cells to test an individual’s strengths. These projects have allowed High to investigate areas such as decomposition and the immune system.
High is also Professor in Arts in Video and New Media and has a lab at the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. High is also a scholar of the history of video technologies, systems, and video art. She co-edited the book The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued, with Sherry Miller Hocking of the Experimental Television Center, and Mona Jimenez of the Moving Image Preservation Program at NYU. The book presents stories of the development of early video tools and systems designed and built by artists and technologists during the late 1960s and ‘70s.
In addition, High is project coordinator for the urban environmental center, NATURE Lab, with the community media organization The Sanctuary for Independent Media, and is also on the board of directors. High is also on the GENSPACE board of directors (Brooklyn) and REFRESH advisory board.
Her art works have been shown at documenta 13 (Germany), Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center and Exit Art (NYC), UCLA (Los Angeles), Science Gallery, (Dublin), NGBK, (Berlin), Fesitval Transitio_MX (Mexico), MASS MoCA (North Adams), Para-site Gallery (Hong Kong), and Esther Klein Gallery, Science Center (Philadelphia). She has had residencies with SymbioticA (2009–10), Finnish Society of Bioart (2013), Coalesce (2016–17), Djerassi Scientific Delirium Madness (2019), DePaolo Lab/ Center for Microbiome Sciences & Therapeutics, UW, Seattle (ongoing).