Born in 1946 in New York City, where she lived and died in 2025, Dara Birnbaum trained in architecture and urban planning at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1976, she graduated in video and electronic editing from the New School for Social Research in New York. Together with Dan Graham, she taught at the Nova Scotia College in Halifax. In 1978 she began using video to deal with the forms of expression and mechanisms of the medium of television, and how it presents political events and reinforces the stereotypes of popular culture. Since then, she has been considered one of the most innovative figures in contemporary art discourse in relation to television. In her multimedia installations and her experimental and provocative videos, she used visual technology to deconstruct the power of media images and the gestures that define contemporary mythologies. She had worked closely with the independent MTV network, for which she had produced some of her works.

Birnbaum's work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010); MoMA, New York (2009 and 2008); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2009); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1995); and Tate Gallery, London (1985), among others. She participated in Documenta 7, 8 and 9 in Kassel (1982, 1987 and 1992) and multiple editions of the Venice Biennale. In 1995 she had a retrospective at the Vienna Kunsthalle. In 2009, the Stedelijk Museum in Ghent hosted a retrospective, which travelled to the Museu Serralves in Porto in 2010. In 2022, the Miller Institute For Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh, Pensilvania, hosted another big retrospective. Her work is included in the collections of the Generali Foundation, Vienna; Stedelijk Museum, Ghent; MoMA, New York; KIASMA, Helsinki; and MACBA, Barcelona, ​​among others.