Sara Diamond is a television and new media producer/director, video artist, curator, critic, teacher and artistic director who has represented Canada at home and internationally for many years.

Diamond is responsible for developing the artistic and professional development direction of Media and Visual Arts, developing research perspectives, Banff New Media Institute workshops and think tanks, co-productions, artists' residencies and partnerships, and work study opportunities in key areas. She is also responsible for the publishing initiatives of Media and Visual Arts and the Walter Phillips Gallery as well as collaborations with the Aboriginal Arts program and other departments of the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Executive Producer Television and New Media Coproductions

At The Banff Centre, Diamond acts as Executive Producer and Producer on numerous independent video and interactive media projects including: "Dreams of the Night Cleaners" by Leila Sujir, "Fast Trip Long Drop" by Gregg Bordowitz, "Aboriginal PSAıs" with the Alliance, "Silent Tears" by Shirley Cheechoo, "Mauve" by Adriene Jenik, "The Secret", by Douglas Cooper, "Conversation with Angels" by Merja and Andy Best, a series about women and art practice for the Womenıs Television Network, "Men", by MJW Dance Company, "Herr" by Jon Greyson, an aboriginal dance series and over one hundred other projects

She works to integrate television and video environments with visual arts and build the new media creation program. Among her accomplishments at the Centre, Diamond developed and implemented artist based video practice, television co-productions of artistsı works in video and video installation support. She has been active in script development, critics residencies, artists Internet projects (NOMAD NET) and new media research consulting for authoring tools and interactive media.

Banff New Media Institute

Diamond also created the Banff New Media Institute (formerly the Multimedia Institute) in the Media and Visual Arts department, which offers a year long series of think-tanks, summits and workshops. Through the New Media Institute, she has created critical theory and strategic planning events for new media including "Flesh Eating Technologies," "Desiring the Death Machine," "New Materialism," "Avatars! Avatars! Wherefore Art Thou," "Out of the Box, into the Future of the Interface," "Big Game Hunters," and "Producing New Media: Money and Law." She is responsible for fund-raising as well as partnerships for the New Media Institute and responsible for developing all new media creative presentations.

Walter Phillips Gallery

Committed to exploring new forms, she created a prototype development environment for interactive media projects and continues to curate one or two major exhibitions each year at the Walter Phillips Gallery for contemporary art at The Banff Centre. The exhibitions usually relate, or involve, interactive media components and a thematic creative residency running at the Centre. Diamond is also a key contributor and creator of the New Media Focus strand of programming.

Work outside Banff Centre

Her own television productions include The Lull Before the Storm, On To Ottawa, and Fit to Be Tied. In 1992, Diamond was honoured with a retrospective exhibition and catalogue at the National Gallery of Canada, following a retrospective at the 1991 IMAGES Festival in Toronto and a solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She often represents Canada internationally at events like Biennial in Sydney, Australia, the Festival of the Arts in Budapest, Hungary, Northern Lights in Tokyo, Japan and Exploding Cinema in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She has had many solo exhibitions including Paternity, an installation commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is now in the permanent collection of the National Gallery.

Her videotapes have been screened in galleries, festivals, classrooms and community events all over the world. They have been collected by diverse institutions such as the Art Bank, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the School of Cinema and Television and many universities, college, libraries, school boards and other organizations.

Diamond has won numerous awards for her videos including Keeping the Home Fires Burning, The Lull Before the Storm and Ten Dollars or Nothing. She was awarded the Gold Medal in History by Simon Fraser University in 1990 and has won awards from the Canada Council, British Columbia Film, British Columbia Culture and various others. One of her most recent honours is the 1995 Bell Canada Award for excellence in video. She was nominated British Columbia Woman of the Year while residing in Vancouver and is included in Canada's Who's Who.

Diamond is a curator, critic and writer, curating many video and art exhibitions, and writing for diverse publications and anthologies on the history of video art, current issues in new technologies, sexuality and censorship, and social history. She has recently completed a history of computer arts in Western Canada and is writing a text on French theory, new media and North American cultural analysis.

She has served on many boards and juries, such as the l996 Chalmers documentary award jury, the Canada Council Media Arts Advisory Committee, the l996 and l997 International Multimedia Awards. She chaired the tri-national arts panel between Mexico, Canada and the United States and has recently served on the Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundation juries and the Governor General Awards jury. Diamond has sat on many boards, including that of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Satellite Video Exchange Society and FUSE Magazine. She was a representative on the federal task force on training for the cultural sector and an alternate on the task force on the rights of the artist, a consultant to the Minister of Canadian Heritage on new media and serves on the SAGIT Secretariat (Cultural Industries Sectoral Advisory on Trade).

Lecturer

As a teacher and lecturer, Diamond leads workshops, lectures and short courses for many post-secondary institutions and art centres. For more than eight years she served as faculty in studio and critical studies at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. She has also taught at the Capilano College Labour Studies Program and the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.

She has acted as an advisor to university programs including the York Film School review and the Technical University of British Columbia. She recently consulted with the federal government of Canada in exploring directions for content creation in new media. She speaks regularly at international multimedia industry conferences such as MILIA, consults with the communications industry on issues of content and delivery and is a regular presenter, curator and consultant for artistsı new media events. She was recently made a member of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television.

Research

In recent years, she has worked increasingly with research and development projects in software, has consulted in developing interactive media curriculum and events and has created think tanks that bring together cultural industries, new media content producers, artists and investors. She has consulted with Brazilian, Cuban, French and other international professional development environments to present interactive media seminars, conferences and exhibitions and served on the l998 SIGGRAPH panels committee. She currently sits on several Ph.D. thesis committees for the University of Calgary and is a member of the advisory council for the development of the Technical University of British Columbia. Diamond is also a visiting professor at UCLA.

She has led research in authoring tools (JAVA client side software, music and 3D imaging) and is currently leading research in advanced design of visualization environments. She contributes to peer review journals in the fields of Media and Communications Studies and sits on the editorial board of peer review journals such as Convergence. Her writing addresses issues of technology, art, womenıs studies, sociology, law and media art history. She is currently co-editing publications about linguistics, games (The Banff Centre and University of Texas at Austin), science and art.

She was born in New York City and has resided in Western Canada since 1978. She is currently the Executive Producer for Television and New Media and the Artistic Director of Media and Visual Arts at the Banff Centre for the Arts.