Lisa Steele, born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1947, studied English Literature at the University of Missouri. She immigrated to Canada in 1968 and is now a Canadian citizen.

Steele's videotapes have been extensively exhibited nationally and internationally, including: the Venice Biennale (1980), the Kunsthalle (Basel), the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the National Gallery of Canada, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), 49th Parallel Videoseries, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Long Beach Museum. Her videotapes are in many collections including: The National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Houston, Texas), Ingrid Oppenheim, Concordia University (Montreal), Newcastle Polytechnic (England), Paulo Cardazzo (Milan), the Canadian Embassy (Tokyo) and the Akademie der Kunst (Berlin).

Steele worked at Interval House, an emergency shelter for battered women in Toronto, from 1974 to 1986. She is a founding director of V tape, a national information and distribution service for independent video, and a founding publisher and editor of FUSE magazine. She has been involved in the anti-censorship movement since 1980, is the past president of the Independent Film and Video Alliance / Alliance de la Video du Cinema Independant, a national lobbying organization for film and video, a founding member of the Independent Artists Union (Toronto), active in the Women's Cultural Building Collective (1980-84), on the Board of directors of A Space Gallery (1984-86, 1989-92), past chair of the New Media Program at the Ontario College of Art where she has taught video since 1981. Steele served for three years on the Advisory panel for Visual Arts at the Canada Council and served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Art Gallery of Ontario from 1993-97.

Steele has published numerous articles, as well as catalogue essays on photographers Bonnie Donohue (Boston) and Pamela Harris (Toronto), and video artists Vera Frenkel (Toronto), Ardele Lister (New York), and John Orentlicher (Syracuse, NY). Steele contributed articles to the books Women against Censorship (1984), edited by Varda Burstyn, Works in Progress (1990), edited by Rhea Tregebov, and Video Loupe, edited by Katy Deepwell (2000, U.K.). In 1996, she co-edited (with Peggy Gale) VIDEO re/VIEW: the (Best) Source For Critical Writings On Canadian Artists' Video, published by Art Metropole and Vtape.

Since 1983, Steele has worked exclusively in collaboration with Kim Tomczak, producing videotapes, performances and photo/text works. Legal Memory (1992), their first feature-length work, has been shown in a number of film festivals since its release, including the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Festival, Festival Internazionale Cinema Giovani (Turin, Italy), and Toronto International Film Festival. Their individual and collaborative work was the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1989-90. In 1993, Steele and Tomczak were recognized with two prestigious awards: the Bell Canada Award for excellence in the field of Canadian video art and a Toronto Arts Award (the Peter Herndorf Media Arts Award). In 1996, their work The Blood Records: written and annotated, received a world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1999 they were guest editors of FELIX, a journal of media arts and culture published in New York. Their installation We're Getting Younger All the Time has been installed in several locations in England, in Venice, and at the Centre d'art Contemporain in Basse-Normandie.

Artist Code: 130