Faculty member and video artist Mary Ellen Strom rarely works alone. She doesn't just collaborate with other artists, though. In the last five years or so, her collaborators have included an increasing number of non-artists: ranchers in Montana, day laborers in California, lawyers in New York City—people who, she says, represent a range of perspectives and have stories that typically are not told in the art world. That is the point. "Who gets to make art?" Strom asks. "Who gets to be in a museum? Those questions are embedded in the work."

Strom grew up in Butte, Montana, a mining community that, because of its industrial history, was diverse and "full of extremes and danger and hard edges." As a kid, she played in abandoned mines and hopped freight trains. In high school she picked up a camera for the first time and began to create video diaries and portraits, learning to observe and document unobtrusively. She never stopped.

Strom's recent projects combine portraiture, history, cultural commentary, and—because she frequently teams up with choreographer Ann Carlson—movement. For a site-specific installation that focused on New York City's garment industry, Strom created larger-than-life-sized video projections of sweatshop workers making gestures from their workplace. She then displayed the videos in an empty Liz Claiborne store. "The idea was to make visible the labor that goes into what we consume," Strom says. "Instead of going into the store and seeing a dress, the spectator was put into a dialogue with the person who made the dress."

Creating meaningful portraits that reflect multiple points of view takes time. "That's the lion's share of my work, developing authentic relationships with people in order to work with them side by side," Strom says. For the garment industry installation, Strom hung around the sweatshops of Chinatown for three months, getting to know people. For a project about the lives of day laborers, she did a similar thing outside a Home Depot store. "Then I start talking about a project I think will be interesting to do," she says. "Often, they don't think it's so interesting. If that's the case, I back down right away and work to find something they can get behind and find fulfilling and engaging."