Steven Bode is Director of Film and Video Umbrella, a London-based agency who are Britain’s main commissioners of artists’ film and video work. During his time in that role (which spans from 1993 to the present), he has initiated well over a hundred different projects, including major new works from internationally-acclaimed artists such as Isaac Julien, Gillian Wearing, Jane & Louise Wilson, Mark Leckey, Johan Grimonprez, Daria Martin, Tacita Dean and Mark Lewis.
Alongside this commissioning activity, he has also curated a number of other large-scale group exhibitions such as Airport (1997, for Photographers’ Gallery, London; with Jeremy Millar), The Other Side of Zero (2000, for Video Positive, Liverpool), and There is No Road (2008, for LABoral, Gijón, Spain) as well as film and video programmes such as New Video from Great Britain (1997, for MoMA, New York).
He has written extensively about video, film and contemporary art for several publications, and has contributed essays to many artists’ monographs, including substantial texts on Dryden Goodwin (for the book Cast, 2009) and Zineb Sedira (for Beneath the Surface, 2011) as well as catalogue essays for numerous Film and Video Umbrella publications.