November 29th 2025
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) announced on November 12 the dismissal of multiple staff members from Video Data Bank, an organization which has been instrumental in the conservation, distribution, curation and programming of video art. This announcement came on the eve of its 50th anniversary, making it a particularly hard blow to the moving image art community. According to Tom Colley, the former director of the institution, he and two other staff members – Elise Schierbeek and Nicky Ni – were abruptly dismissed from VDB.
In a private letter written in response to a query by a member of the faculty, Martin Berger, the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at SAIC, stated that “…like many colleges, SAIC is facing financial pressures due to changes in federal policy… We have taken several actions to reduce spending, including the elimination of a limited number of staff.”
VDB was founded at SAIC in 1976 and has, over the course of the intervening decades, amassed a large collection of over 6,000 titles by around 600 artists, many of them being definitive works in the history of film and video art. The downsizing of VDB has elicited condemnation from the broader artistic community, cultural workers and institutions in the US.