Inaugurating the Moody Center for the Arts’ 10th anniversary year, Diana Thater: True Life Adventures offers a focused retrospective that brings together works spanning the artist’s career and examines humanity’s evolving relationship to nonhuman life. Returning to an artist whose The Starry Messenger (2014) was presented during the Moody’s first year, the exhibition revisits a multidisciplinary practice long concerned with how imaging technologies shape our understanding of animals, ecosystems, and worlds beyond the human.

Across immersive installations incorporating projected video, monitors, sound, window film, and colored light, Thater creates environments that make visible how encounters with the nonhuman are experienced—through screens, enclosures, field sites, and other mediated settings. Her work draws the viewer into the conditions of looking itself, foregrounding the technological, cultural, and institutional frameworks through which the natural world is seen and understood, and emphasizing the distance between reality and its representation.

Bringing together works from the 1990s to the present—including some that have never before been presented in the US and others that have not been on view in nearly three decades—the exhibition offers a renewed perspective on a practice that anticipated many of today’s conversations surrounding ecology, representation, and the agency of the more-than-human world.

About Diana Thater
Diana Thater (b. 1962, San Francisco) is among the most influential artists to emerge in the 1990s. She creates film, video, and installation works that challenge how we experience moving images. Drawing on sources as varied as literature, animal behavior, mathematics, chess, and sociology, she layers projected imagery onto the surrounding architecture, building complex relationships between time and space.  

Thater has had solo exhibitions internationally, including LUMA Arles, France (2024); the ICA Watershed, Boston (2018); and A Runaway World, which debuted at The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2017), before traveling to Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, and the Guggenheim Bilbao. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized The Sympathetic Imagination (2015), a mid-career survey that traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Earlier solo shows include The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Secession, Vienna; and Kunsthalle Basel. Her work is held in museum collections worldwide.  

Thater's honors include a Milestone Grant from the Trellis Art Fund (2025), a LACMA Art + Technology Lab Grant (2018), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2005), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1993). Thater studied art history at New York University and received her MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, where she has taught since 1995 and now chairs the Art Department.