Valerie Hird, a painter, stage designer and award-winning filmmaker who lives and works between Vermont, New York, and the MENA regions. Her work explores cultural mythologies and the roles they play in our societal perceptions. She’s spent years moving across cultures listening and collecting stories, fascinated by the way some tales survive and evolve to transfer easily between illusion, reality, myth, and metaphor.

Lately she’s begun exploring her own ‘Biomythology’, digging into the uneasy intersection between America’s published histories and personal memory, using the books, movies and news media that have influenced her along the way. Her 3-dimensional books and animations challenge the idea of a homogeneous and authentic national story narrative, believing, instead, that we should understand terms such as “traditions”, “cultures” and “identities” as unstable, abstract, and evolving with time and context.

Hird received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design 1977 and an MFA from Vermont College 2007. She is represented by the Nohra Haime Gallery, 500 West 21st New York, NY 10011, NH Galeria, Cartagena, Colombia and the Furchgott Sourdiff Gallery, Shelburne, VT. Retired Professor of Art, Saint Michaels College, and Professor of Visual Linguistics, CORE Division, Champlain College, in Vermont. (2000-2019)

Disciplines

• Animation
• Artist Books
• Digital Arts
• Drawing
• Film/Video/Media
• Interdisciplinary/Hybrid
• Painting
• Printmaking
• Sculptural Books