Complete Bio
Through rich imagery and an acute sense of visual metaphor, Edin Velez, one of the pioneers in video art, has consistently expanded the paradigms of the genre.
He has been awarded both Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships as well as the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award for Excellence in Film and Video.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Edin moved to the US in the early seventies and became part of the first generation of video artists working in SoHo.
His works have been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, Documenta 8, Sao Paolo Biennial, The Tate Gallery, and the Louvre Museum , among others and are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art: New York, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Hara Museum, Japan, and others.
The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Beijing, China, screened his video Meta Mayan II as part of the exhibition Synthetic Times which was curated in conjunction with the Olympic Games in 2008.
His experimental feature length narrative A Certain Foolish Consistency premiered at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC in 2007.
He has received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Massachusetts Council for the Arts and The Jerome Foundation, among others.
His award winning documentary on Japanese Butoh, Dance of Darkness, was broadcast nationally in the USA by PBS and internationally in France and Germany by ARTE TV.
The Mori Museum of Art, Tokyo, included his video Meta Mayan II in their exhibition Modern Means (2004). This landmark survey of roughly 290 works represents a narrative of the development of modern art from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. It included artists such as Picasso, Gauguin, Rauschenberg, Judd, Viola, Warhol.
Edin has also been creating large Giclée photographic prints based on his videos which have been exhibited at Stux Gallery, Phillips de Pury, Nurture Art Gallery and others.
Edin is a Professor and Coordinator of the Video Program at Rutgers University, Newark.
He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.