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Connie Samaras is a Los Angeles-based artist who works mostly in photography and video.

Early life and education
Samaras was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the early 1950s. She received her M.F.A. degree from Eastern Michigan University.

Career
Connie Samaras' artistic career as a photographer and videographer has focused on feminism (specifically second wave), culture, technology, sexuality and gender studies, science, and both man-made and natural environments. She is a full professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Samaras has showed her works in museums and galleries across the globe in both solo exhibitions and group shows. Some of her most notable shows include the California Museum of Photography 2011, the New Mexico Museum of Art 2001, Tauranga Museum 2009, the Japanese National American Museum 2008, and the Tijuana V International Biennial of Standards 2008.

After the American Century was a photographic project that revolved around the city of Dubai and its vast city construction projects. The work as a whole examines the politics and economics of such extreme constructed environments. She explores the idea of Dubai being a city that is of the future, yet it is placed in the Arabian desert an area with a long history. The inhuman buildings and the pictures being almost entirely devoid of life, which leads to the photographs having a dysotopian science fiction feel to them.

V.A.L.I.S (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) was a photographic project that Samaras worked on through a National Science Foundation's Artists and Writers grant that took her to Antarctica for two years between 2005 and 2007. The premise of Samaras' project was to document the extreme environment and how it affected the surrounding architecture as time passed. In the photos one sees how the ice and harsh environment repeatedly consume the human made structures in the area-people have had to constantly rebuild in Antarctica due to the fact that buildings made decades ago are now buried under layers of snow and ice. Her works from Antarctica reflect the deadpan approach, which avoid prompting emotional responses and keeps out any sort of bias that influence the viewers.

Angelic States Even Sequences was a photographic project that focused on various cities across the United States and urban forms of surveillance and technological presence.

List of major works

 * Spaceport America (Archival inkjet prints, 2010)
 * After the American Century (Archival inkjet prints, 2009)
 * V.A.L.I.S (Archival inkjet prints, 2005-2007)
 * Angelic States - Event Sequence (Archival inkjet prints, 1998-2003)
 * Surface Events (Archival inkjet prints, 1990-present)
 * Dark Side of the Moon (Archival inkjet prints, 2003-2005)
 * Dreaming of the Millennium (Photographs and text, 1999-2000)
 * A Partial Correction ...Voyager Space Probes (C-prints and inkjets, 1994)
 * Paranoid Delusions (Ink, mylar, black and white photos, 1986-1989)
 * Autoworld (Standard video production still, 1989)

Awards and grants
Connie Samaras has received many prestigious awards and grants throughout her career. These include the Fall 2011 Andy Warhol Foundation grant, the National Science Foundation Artist and Writers grant, the Getty's Mid-Career Visual Arts Fellowship in 2006, Anonymous was a Woman in 2003, COLA Mid-Career Artistic Fellowship 2003, Banff Centre for the Arts Senior Artist Award 2000 and New Media Institute Residency 1999, and the National Endowment for the Arts Special Exhibitions Grant 1994.

Publications

 * American Dreams The Scholar the Feminist Online: Gender on Ice (2008)
 * Dream, September 10, 2001 X-TRA: Travel Issue (2002)
 * Entries and Exits Terminals: The Cultural Production of Death (1999)
 * Abduction, a wretch like me Whitewalls: A Journal of Language Art (1994)
 * Look Who's Talking Artforum (1991)