Susan Hiller

Susan Hiller
Born	1940 Tallahassee, Florida
Nationality	American
Known for	Installation, video, photography, performance and writing.
Notable work	Belshazzar's Feast, (1983-4) Witness, (2000)

Susan Hiller (born 1940) is an American-born artist who lives in London, UK. Her art practice includes installation, video, photography, performance and writing.

Born in Tallahassee, Florida in 1940, Susan Hiller was raised in and around Cleveland, Ohio. She later moved to Coral Gables, Florida in 1950 where she attended Coral Gables High School, graduating in 1957. She attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and received a B.A. in 1961. After spending a year in New York studying photography, film, drawing and linguistics, HIller went on to pursue a post-graduate degree at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana with a National Science Foundation Fellowship in Anthropology. She completed a Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1965.

After doing fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, with a grant from the Middle American Research Institute (1962-5), Hiller became critical of academic anthropology; she did not want her research to be part of the "objectification of the contrariness of lived events [that was] destined to become another complicit thread woven into the fabric of 'evidence' that would help anthropology become a science". It was during a slide lecture on African art, that Hiller decided to become an artist. She felt art was "above all, irrational, mysterious, numinous … [she] decided [she] would become not an anthropologist but an artist: [she] would relinquish factuality for fantasy". This decision to begin an art practice was an effort, as the artist later recalled, to "find a way to be inside all my activities."

Beginning her artistic practice in the early 1970s, Hiller was influenced by the visual language of Minimalism and Conceptual art and now cites Minimalism, Fluxus, Surrealism and her study of anthropology as major influences on her work.

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