Kathy High graduated with a
BA from
Colgate University in 1976 and an
MAH from the Center for Media Studies at
University at Buffalo in 1981 where she studied with media pioneers
Tony Conrad,
Hollis Frampton, and
Steina Vasulka. High was a founding member of
The Standby Program in New York City and initiated the video exhibition program at
Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, NY in the 1980s. High's single-channel video works include documentary and experimental forms. Video Data Bank describes her videos as incorporating archival footage, interviews, fictional material, and irony, with subjects including body politics, science fiction, and the paranormal. This work connects her to video art practices that developed from the media arts environment in which she trained. In 1991, she founded
FELIX: A Journal of Media Arts and Communication produced in conjunction with The Standby Program
. She is co-editor of
The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued, with Sherry Miller Hocking and Mona Jimenez. She has been a professor of video and new media at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in
Troy, New York since 2002.
The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued addresses the history of some of the first video processing tools that were constructed by inventors and artists in the latter part of the 1960s and 1970s. This work is concerned with the efforts of inventors, designers, and artists who created tools for capturing, transforming, and manipulating video images. Her work has appeared in the
Guggenheim Museum,
Catalyst Arts,
MASS MoCA, and the
Museum of Modern Art among others and she has received grants from the
National Endowment for the Arts,
Rockefeller Foundation, and
New York State Council on the Arts. High's video works are distributed through
Video Data Bank and her films
I Need Your Full Cooperation/Underexposed and
Underexposed are distributed by
Women Make Movies. ==Notable works==