Born in New York in 1946, Dara Birnbaum received a Bachelor of Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh in 1969; a B.F.A. in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973; and a Certificate in Video and Electronic Editing at the Video Study Center at the New School for Social Research, New York, in 1976. She has been the recipient of numerous distinguished awards, including most recently, a Rockefeller Creative Artist Residency earlier this year, the highly prestigious United States Artists Fellowship in 2010, and a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2011. In the past, she won the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists; the Special Jury Prize-Deutsche Videokunstpreis, Südwestfunk TV & Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie; the TV Picture Prize, International Festival of Video and Electronic Arts in Locarno, Switzerland; among many others.