Pioneering video artist Dara Birnbaum was instrumental in the feminist art movement of the late-sixties and seventies and one of the first artists to appropriate television imagery in videos that exposed the underlying ideologies of the mass media, particularly its portrayals of women. For her earliest, pre-VCR works, she pirated raw footage from TV stations, repeating images to construct new meanings. In later works, she has addressed important political events such as the Gulf War, always “analyzing the politics of image-making.” Birnbaum has taught at numerous universities around the world. A major retrospective of her work opened in March 2010 at the Fundação Serralves in Porto, Portugal.