Hisham Bizri is a filmmaker and visual artist from Lebanon currently living in San Francisco, U.S.A. He has been making films, videos and multi-media installations that are meditations on his exilic experience as a Lebanese/Muslim living in the West. The Lebanese Civil War, as well as the Arab-Israeli conflicts (the Naqba, Naqsa, and the Intifadas), and most recently the events in the Gulf War, have shaped and continue to shape what he does in life and art. He has studied in the U.S. with Raoul Ruiz and Miklós Jancsó and lectured extensively in the U.S., Lebanon, France, Ireland, Korea, and Japan. He created the first cinematic virtual reality installations for the CAVE (premiered at Ars Electronica and ISEA '97), and directed a number of narrative and experimental films and videos which have been shown nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Louvre Museum (Paris), Biarritz Opera House (France), Institute du Monde Arabe (Paris), among others. He was recently an artist-in-residence at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and currently heads the time-based art program at the University of California, Davis. Hisham is concerned with portraying himself as both an artist and a human being through his work. He hopes to expand the use of digital technology in the service of cinema and installation art, one that depicts the world, rather than expresses some ideological, semiotic, or linguistic sign. In other words, he hopes to bring aesthetics back to cinema, so that cinema can be seen once more as a window onto the world, and not as a mechanistic vehicle for ideology.