Steve Hawley was born in Wakefield, UK in 1952 and studied Fine Art at Brighton Polytechnic, where the first generation British video artist Mick Hartney fostered his interest in the medium. He has been working with film and video since 1981, and his work has been shown at video festivals and broadcast worldwide since then. His original preoccupation was with language and image, and in 1995 Language Lessons (with Tony Steyger), an experimental documentary on artificial languages was broadcast on Channel 4 TV.

More recently his work has looked at new forms of narrative. Examples include, Love Under Mercury, his first film for the cinema, which won a prize at the Ann Arbor film festival, and Amen ICA Cinema 2002, a palindromic video which won the prize for most original video at the Vancouver Videopoem festival.

His recent work has explored issues around HD video (Barnum Effect 2007) and Not to Scale, shot on HD in model villages, was shown in the 2009 Istanbul Biennale as part of the Sheffield 09 Pavilion. Currently he is developing DVD based generative narrative works such as Yarn 2011, premiered at the Australian International Experimental Film Festival in Melbourne, which use the medium to create an ongoing recombinant narrative.

He is Professor and Head of Media at the Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University.

Artist Code: 084