Leah Gilliam Born, 1967 in Washington, DC Biography Leah Gilliam credits a journalist mother and an abstract painter father with her early exposure to cultural production. Ms. Gilliam studied Modern Culture and Media at Brown University (B.A, 1989) and Film and Twentieth Century Studies at The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (M.F.A., 1992). Her new media projects have been presented at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Thread Waxing Space Gallery, and traveled as part of the exhibition "Contact Zones: The Art of the CD-ROM." Ms. Gilliam's video Apeshit was voted one of the "Best of 1999" by Film Comment and her 1995 video Sapphire and the Slave Girl was the winner of the New Visions Video Award for the San Francisco International Film Festival. Leah Gilliam's work examines how knowledge is produced and coded and how the conscious reorientation of cultural texts challenges their implications and constructions. In practice, she appropriates texts and uses them as a springboard to interpret larger issues of race, gender and sexual orientation. Ms. Gilliam's current interests include Lego Mindstorm Robotic Discovery kits and the colonization of Mars. Film/Video. B.A., Brown University; M.F.A., University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. First solo museum exhibition, Agenda for a Landscape, was presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 2002. Her new-media projects have been presented widely, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and Thread Waxing Space, both in New York, and the DATABASE festival, and have traveled as part of the exhibitions Contact Zones: The Art of the CD-ROM and Race in Digital Space. Gilliam's video Apeshit was voted one of the "Best of 1999" by Film Comment and her 1995 video Sapphire and the Slave Girl was the winner of the New Visions Video Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. She worked in Residence at the Experimental Television Center. Her projects have been funded by the Creative Capital Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Experimental Television Center. Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts, Bard College.