Lisa Steele + Kim Tomczak have worked exclusively in collaboration since 1983, producing videotapes, performances and photo/text works. They have received numerous grants and awards including the Bell Canada prize for excellence in Video Art, a Toronto Arts Award and in 2005, a Governor General’s Award for lifetime achievement in Visual & Media Arts.
Major public art commissions include Love Squared, screened on the video board at Yonge & Dundas in Toronto and Watertable, a light and sound installation that marks the original shoreline of Lake Ontario at the foot of historic Fort York.
They are co-founders of Vtape, a Toronto media arts centre, where Tomczak is Restoration & Collections Management Director and Steele is the Creative Director in charge of programming.
They both teach at the University of Toronto in the Visual Studies programme in the Department of Art, cycling through a variety of studio and seminar style undergraduate courses including: Photo Chemical; Video for Artists; Advanced Video Projects; Time Based Arts, Intro and Advanced; Performance Artists and the Critical Curatorial Lab. Steele also teaches a first year lecture course, Visual Concepts, an introduction to the 20th and 21st Centuries. Steele is Graduate Program Director of the MVS (Masters of Visual Studies) Studio and both Steele and Tomczak supervise graduate students in the MVS.