"Generally speaking, my work is concerned with cultural regimentation and assimilation as it relates to the codification of behavior. The performers in my pieces are the true Ômedia,Õ and watching them transcend or transform against or through the various restraints imposed by the work is its broader social metaphor." Catherine Sullivan has referred to her work as “an anthropology of theater,” making, as she does, single and multi channel video installations which rest upon the body’s capacity to signify and audience’s ability to read the transmission of expressive performative content. Using the theater as a site of emotional transcendence, and examining theatrical conventions as a means to question the politics of artifice, the presentation of violence, and trauma, Sullivan employs rigorous compositional armature which grounds the work’s compelling beauty. Her animation of problems—failed theatricality, the super theatrical, spectatorial discomfort—reveal Sullivan’s own cultural inheritance (Richard Foreman, Chantal Akerman, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, Jean-Luc Goddard…) and manifest her twined political and poetic concerns. Restaging a scene in The Miracle Worker, the 1962 film about Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan, she unleashes ten Annie’s and ten Helen’s performing multiple theatrical tropes—the hysteric, melancholic, manic, paranoiac—making acting both problematic and visible.

Born 1968, Los Angeles Lives in Los Angeles 1997 M.F.A., Art Center College of Design 1992 B.F.A., California Institute of the Arts

	2003	Speech Model from ÔThe FliesÕ, Fruits of Crime, Goose Fair, (with Lisa Lapinski), Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna, Austria
	2003	ÔTis Pity SheÕs a Fluxus Whore, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Traveled
	2002	Five Economies (big hunt/little hunt), Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; Traveled; Catalogue
	2001	Unspoken Evil III—Rites of Ascension and Obscurity, Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels
	2001	Gestus Maximus (Gold Standard), Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, Germany

	2003	Lyon Manifestation, Opera De Lyon, France, in conjunction with Le Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon, and in conjunction with the festival “Nouvelles Scènes” presented by Le Consortium Art Center, Dijon, France
	2003	Wadsworth Manifestation, Presented in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Tis Pity She’s a Fluxus Whore, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Aetna Auditorium
	2002	Gold Standard (Canetti/Gibson Infusion), Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Catherine Sullivan: Five Economies (big hunt/little hunt), UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago
	2001	Grisly Notes and Tones, Presented by Le Consortium Art Center, Dijon, France, as part of the annual festival “Nouvelles Scènes”
	1998	Let the Right Be a Vision of the Left, Trapdoor Theatre, Chicago
	1997	Dad’s Ham, Trapdoor Theatre, Chicago
	1995	Unspoken Evil I, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena

	2001	Gold Standard (hysteric, melancholic, degraded, refined), Date Palm Dance, Unspoken Evil III—Rites of Ascension and Obscurity, Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
	1999	Chirologic Remedy, Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, Germany; Traveled
	1996	Unspoken Evil II, Three Day Weekend, Los Angeles

	2004	Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
	2003	Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, France
	2003	Baja to Vancouver, Vancouver Art Gallery Vancouver, Canada
	2003	Works on Paper, Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles
	2003	Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation in Contemporary Art, Museum of Modern Art Dubrovnik, Croatia
	2002	Crisp, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
	2000	L.A.-ex, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany
	1998	Still and Otherwise, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles
	1998	Lines of Sight, The California Aqueduct, Lancaster, California

	2004	Jana, Reena. The Ambiguity of Vision, Tema Celeste (March/April)
	2003	Sundell, Margaret. Repeat Performance, The Art of Catherine Sullivan, Art Forum International (October)
	2002	Yood, James. Catherine Sullivan/Renaissance Society, Art Forum International (September)
	2000	Sullivan, Catherine. Through the Scattered Glances, Spring Journal (Volume 1)
	1998	Hall, Alexis, Catherine Sullivan, and Benjamin Weissman, eds. The Red Perils of Voluminous Green Asteroid Impaired: Righteous American Fiction, Vol. I. Pasadena, California: Art Center College of Design