Diane Teramana

Diane Teramana was born in 1942 in Steubenville, Ohio. She received a BA in painting from The Ohio State University in the early 1960's. Shortly after graduating, she married and had two children. While they were still infants she divorced her philandering husband and went back to OSU to get a Master's degree in film. She said she fell in love with moving images as they seemed to make paintings come alive.

Diane has received numerous fellowships, grants and awards for her work, most notably, a major media fellowship, a ten thousand dollar award for her work in video in 1999. In 1993, she presented her video work in a one-woman show at The Knitting Factory, NYC (curated by Stephen Vitiello), and in 1995, she screened her work and was a panelist for the show, Internal Clatter: Women's Video Art in the Seventies, at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. She has had numerous other one-woman shows including C.A.G .E. Gallery, the Cincinnati Film Society, the 1989 Athens International Film & Video Festival where she also served as juror, and the Dayton Visual Art Center and Prince Ubu Gallery, Columbus. Her work was selected for a group show by John Hanhardt, then film & video curator at the Whitney Museum. She has completed six residencies at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York. In recent years she has shown her work as part of the In the Works showcase at the Woodstock Center of Photography, the Woodstock Museum Film Festival, and been in group shows at the Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, NY and the Kleinert Gallery in Woodstock NY.

Her decision to create her first performance work was inspired by her collaboration with performance Artist Ki ken Chin (C.A.G .E. Gallery, Cincinnati, 1989). She received grants from the Cincinnati Arts Allocation and the Ohio Arts Council for her 1992 performance, Mickey Dipped in the Black Stream featuring poet/dancer Michele Morgan. In a review of the performance, Jud Yalkut states: "Teramana's search for a collective catharsis through the multi-media juxtaposition of audio, video, poetry and dance has reached a new apotheosis with this collaborative work. It is an effective integration of the video medium in both its composed and spontaneous forms." (Dialogue Magazine) Subsequent performances include: The Cleveland Performance Art Festival; C.A.G .E. & Base Art Gallery.

She affirms: “My work is the most, and least, significant thing about me.”