Diane Olson-Bush was born in Buffalo, N.Y. At the age of 18, she emigrated to the U.K. with a draft dodger, in response to the Vietnam War. After living there for ten years and working as a documentary photographer, she returned to the U.S. to attend to her ailing parents. Once back in Buffalo, N.Y. she obtained her Master's Degree in Photography from the State University of New York at Buffaloi by documenting local boxing gyms and billiard halls.
After graduating, she spent seven years as staff photographer at the local affiliate of the National Public Broadcasting and ABC-TV stations. At the same time she pursued self-imposed artistic projects and established a public arts organization.
Diane returned to academia by spending six years as the Coordinator of the Photography Department at a local two-year college just outside of Buffalo. While her students were winning numerous national awards and prizes, Diane was doing the same with her own professional and artistic work, through the generosity of such entities as Kodak, Polaroid, Women in Photography, Nikon, Ilford, the Royal Photographic Society, Friends of Photography (San Francisco), The Albright –Knox Art Gallery, and the United Nations.
Throughout her professional career, Diane has continued to exhibit her work in approximately 2-5 group shows per year, and has been both exhibited and published locally, nationally, and internationally, including shows in Japan, China, Great Britain, Germany, Czechoslovakia and France. Since her relocation to Las Vegas in 1997, she has been awarded 15 grants and a Fellowship from the Nevada Arts Council. In 2009 she became a U.S.A. Fellowship nominee. Diane continues to teach occasional photographic workshop and donates her time to many local non-profit art organizations.
Diane’s satirical and fine art imagery sourced from T.V. screens spans over 30 years, and includes videos, talking pictures, performance work, and stills.
Bush’s 2006 published monograph, WARHEADS contains images that satirize America’s news censorship of the Iraqi War. These were created by shooting TV surfaces with a macro lens at obtuse angles and throwing bleach on her C-prints. A recent 6 page interview with Diane about art and activism was recently published in the journal AFTERIMAGE.
Diane is a past President and Secretary of the Contemporary Arts Center of Las Vegas where she lives with her artist husband, Steve Baskin, and Mookie the cat. Both she and her husband collect everything vintage but have a very soft spot for anything mid-century, mod and psychedelic.