Doug Hall is an American photographer and media artist, who has received national and international recognition for his work in a range of practices including performance, installation, video, and photography. He lives in San Francisco, where in addition to his studio work he has been an influential teacher. From 1981-2008, he was a prominent member of the New Genres Department faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute. After retiring from the Art Institute in 2008, he joined the Graduate Fine Arts faculty at the California College of the Arts, where he continues to work with students on a limited basis as a visiting artist.
Born in 1944, Hall graduated from Harvard College in 1966 with a B.A. in Anthropology. While an undergraduate, he became involved in the radical politics and social theory that was circulating around Cambridge at the time. He also took numerous design courses at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, which, at the time, was as close as Harvard came to studio art classes; acted in plays and independent films; and participated in theatrical productions that were “influenced by the writings of Antonin Artaud and Samuel Becket.” Hall claims that it was this combination of influences that led him into the visual arts, which he imagined as a system of thought and action flexible enough to engage his emerging interests and concerns. In 1969, Hall received his M.F.A. in
sculpture from the Rinehart School of Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 1967 where he met Diane Andrews. They were married later that year and in the summer of 1969, after completing graduate school, moved to San Francisco.