Video Data Bank Awarded NAMAC's Outstanding Media Arts Organization Brigid Reagan, Hans Sundquist, Tom Colley, Abina Manning, and Dewayne Slightweight October 11 -- The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is pleased to announce that the Video Data Bank will be awarded the National Alliance for Media Arts + Culture (NAMAC) "Outstanding Media Arts Organization" on October 18. NAMAC awards are given to a media arts organization, a media artist, and a philanthropic institution that have made a major contribution to the independent media field nationally. VDB will join such past winners as the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and Appalshop. The award will be presented by Steve Seid, Video Curator at the Pacific Film Archive, as a part of the 2007 NAMAC Conference, The Frontier is Here: Create, Engage, Act , held October 17-19 in Austin, Texas. Also receiving NAMAC awards at the convention are filmmaker and writer Lourdes Portillo (whose videos Columbus on Trial and Corpus [A Home Movie for Selena] are included in the VDB's collection) and the William Penn Foundation, for its philanthropic support of media arts. VDB Interim Director Abina Manning says, "as a 'behind-the-scenes' organization, working for over thirty years to archive, preserve, curate, and distribute artists' video, we are especially thrilled to be chosen for this award. Receiving such recognition from a group of our peers in the media art community makes it all the more rewarding. It's our equivalent of an Oscar!" About the Video Data Bank (VDB): Founded in 1976 by Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield at the inception of the media arts movement, the Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collections feature innovative video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political, or personal point of view. The collections include seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. The videos in our collections employ innovative uses of form and technology mixed with original visual style to address contemporary art and cultural themes. Through a national and international distribution service, the VDB makes video art, documentaries made by artists, and taped interviews with visual artists and critics available to a wide range of audiences. The Video Data Bank is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art, and the Illinois Arts Council, an agency of the state.   Visit the NAMAC website for more information.