Visual artist and filmmaker Nataša Prosenc Stearns (1966) earned her BA at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. She moved to Los Angeles on a Fulbright Grant for her MFA at California Institute of the Arts. Her body of work ranges from single-channel videos, video installations, short and feature films to photo-collage prints. She explores innovative strategies in storytelling and visual expression and is known for creative use of non-gallery spaces and large multi-channel installations. Her areas of artistic exploration include alienation and identity, movement and metamorphosis. Transition is organic to her own life, as she has been crossing the Atlantic Ocean from her home in Slovenia to her other home in the United States for the last 25 years. The various abstractions of the body imply a struggle against masculinist presuppositions, orders, and hierarchies. She has developed a visual language that integrates seemingly unrelated spaces and figures. This allows her to address another of her chosen topics – the interconnectedness and unity of all things. Her works seek wholeness or fusion, a personal and social identity, that never seems entirely settled, never completely finished.
Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, the Douloun Museum of Art in Shanghai, ARCO Fair Madrid, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, and others. Her videos and films have been screened at SXSW, Films de femmes Paris, AVIFF Cannes, Brooklyn Film Festival, Chicago Independent Film Festival, Pacific Film Archives Berkeley, RedCat at Disney Music Hall in Los Angeles and other venues. She is a recipient of The Soros Grant, The Durfee Grant and The Prešeren Fund Award – the Slovenian award for outstanding achievement in art. Her videos are also featured in the contemporary opera code L by composer Milko Lazar, who is also the composer of the music for several of her works.

Photo: Matt Allen, personal archive

Nataša Prosenc Stearns: Between Body and Space. Screening of film/video oeuvre 1989–2024 (SCCA-Ljubljana and Slovenian Cinematheque)
Accompanying programme Between Body and Space at Slovenian Film Database (BSF)