Before becoming a full-fledged medium, video was intrinsically linked to television. It wasn’t until the 1960s—most notably with the launch of the Sony Portapak in 1967, the first portable video recorder—that video became independent of television shows and sets. This development made it possible to film anywhere, and artists began to embrace the technique in their practices.

The first uses of the electronic image as an artistic medium appeared within the Fluxus movement. In March 1963, Nam June Paik (1932–2006) created a distorted television image by placing a magnet close to the cathode-ray tube. This work is remembered as the birth of video art.

Since then, many women artists have adopted the medium and contributed to its development. VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940) infiltrated the world of television in her 1971 work Facing a Family, questioning the relationship between watching and being watched. Ulrike Rosenbach (b. 1943) was among the first video artists to create closed-circuit pieces, simultaneously filming and projecting images. Performers Marina Abramović (b. 1946) and Leda Papaconstantinou (b. 1945) began documenting their actions in the late 1960s, transforming the relationship between their work and the ephemeral.

From 1972 to 1980, the Women’s Video Festival took place at The Kitchen in New York, spotlighting underrepresented video artists such as Japanese artist Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015), a member of the Fluxus group.

Video art opened up a new universe of experimentation: images could be manipulated or erased, with or without archiving. Nan Hoover (1931–2008) explored the possibilities of transparency, creating works that hovered between painting and film. Dóra Maurer (b. 1937) has worked with repetition and variation, producing complex compositions of image and sound.

As both a creative tool and a means of protest, video became a way to challenge the dominant artistic movements of the 1960s. Joan Jonas (b. 1936) approached her work with an introspective, narrative, and symbolic style, breaking away from minimal art. In Up and Including Her Limits (1973), Carolee Schneemann (b. 1938) drew by following the movements of her body, suspended during a performance that was filmed and broadcast on monitors. In this work, the artist evoked a gesture akin to action painting but distanced herself from it by treating the resulting drawings as secondary, raising questions about the relationship between creative process and final work.

Like photography, the video camera has become a privileged medium for exposing and denouncing oppression. Martine Barrat (b. 1937) directed a series of videos on the lives of gang members in the South Bronx. In the installation La Roquette, Prisons de femmes, Nil Yalter (b. 1938), in collaboration with Judy Blum (b. 1943) and Nicole Croiset, denounced prison conditions. Howardena Pindell (b. 1943) addresses issues of race and gender, while Anna Maria Maiolino (b. 1942) condemns the censorship of women in Brazil. The filmmaking duo Maria Klonaris (1947–2014) and Katerina Thomadaki (b. 1947) theorized what they called “corporeal cinema,” making the female body and identity central to visual and political exploration. Serving various militant causes, video became an instrument for subverting patriarchy. As early as 1976, the French video collective Les Insoumuses declared in their video Maso et Miso vont en bateau: “No television image can embody us; it is with video that we will tell our own stories.”

Video has been extensively embraced by women artists. Numerous writings continue to highlight their place in art history and the connections between this medium and political as well as feminist struggles. The joint publications Black Women Film and Video Artists (1998), edited by Jacqueline Bobo, and Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image: Contexts and Practices (2019), edited by Lucy Reynolds, are significant milestones in the study of women video artists.