Valerie Hird (she/her) is a multi-media visual artist integrating traditional painting media with film, soundscapes and sculpture. She divides her time between Vermont, New York, and the MENA regions. Her work explores cultural mythologies and the impact they have on self-perception. She’s spent years moving across cultures (the Near and Middle East, Central Asia, and Europe) exploring the porous borders between reality and myth. She is fascinated by the way stories are retold, evolving to slip easily between fact, fiction, and metaphor. Lately she's begun exploring her own ‘Biomythology’, digging into the uneasy intersection between America’s published histories and personal memory, using the popular literature, movies and news media that influenced her. Using stories familiar to many, she destabilizes them, reaching simultaneously backward and forward along their narrative timelines to suggest interpretation is never singular, but multiple, embracing past assumptions, present perspectives, and future speculations. 

Hird received her BA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1977 and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts 2007. She is represented by the Nohra Haime Gallery in New York. She has won animation and women filmmaker’s awards for her two recent films, ‘What DID Happen to Alice?’ and ‘The Unattended Moment’ from Aesthetica Art Prize in the UK, Berlin Shorts Festival, Toronto Indie Film Festival, Montreal Indie Film Festival and WRPN Women’s Film Festival. She was commissioned in 2022 to create a new animation, ‘The Garden of Absolute Truths’ by Burlington City Arts.