Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California, in 1969, and partly raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2007 Time Magazine named her one of the country's one hundred most influential artists. In 1997, Kara Walker won the MacArthur "genius" award - one of the youngest artists to be so honored. This was for her body of work, which centers on race, and the powerful psychological projections that are attached to stereotypes. From the start of her career, Walker has used the antiquated silhouette form to address slavery, and it's resulting confusion: "carpet-bagging," "freedom," miscegenation. It was only a matter of time before the artist made the next step-by having her sweeping still narratives move. In 2004, Walker directed her first film, "Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions"-a film that gains in narrative power through its chronological confusion. Things happen, but when? While a Walker film is rooted in the history of slavery-we recognize the plantation, the masters and the slaves - we see it through a modern lens, informed by our knowledge of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," "Mandingo," and other sexed up, vexing conceits. Walker means to incorporate both views in her work - the historical and the ahistorical, the trashy and the exalted, while opening the viewer up to another vista altogether: their race-defined, not to say limited, self.