Bill Viola was born January 25, 1951, in New York. From 1969, he studied at the College of Visual and Performing Arts of Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, graduating with a B.F.A. in 1973.

During the 1970s, Viola assisted Nam June Paik and Peter Campus with various projects, and between 1973 and 1980 worked with the composer David Tudor and the avant-garde music group Composers Inside Electronics. From 1974 to 1976, he was the technical production manager of the Art/Tapes/22 Video Studio in Florence and from 1976 to 1983 was a visiting artist at the WNET/Thirteen Television Laboratory in New York. During this time, Viola traveled frequently to the South Pacific, Indonesia, Australia, Tunisia, and India.

In 1978, and again in 1983 and 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Viola a Visual Artist Fellowship for his work in video. From 1980 to 1981, he lived in Japan on a fellowship from the U.S./Japan Friendship Commission, and was an artist-in-residence at the Sony Corporation’s Atsugi Laboratories, Atsugi, Japan. He received a Video Artist Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1982. In 1983, he taught video at the California Institute for the Arts in Valencia. He received the Polaroid Video Award for outstanding achievement in 1984, and spent part of that year as artist-in-residence at the San Diego Zoo. Also in 1984, he traveled to Fiji to document the fire-walking ceremony of the South Indian community in Suva. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation presented Viola with a video stipend in 1985. In 1987, he won the American Film Institute Maya Deren Award, and two years later, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award. That year, he traveled throughout the American Southwest to study ancient Native American archeological sites and rock art. In 1993, he was the first recipient of the Medienkunstpreis, awarded by ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany, and the Siemens Kulturprogramm. In 1995, he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University.

Among Viola’s numerous individual exhibitions since 1973 are Projects, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1979; Bill Viola: Survey of a Decade, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas, 1988; Bill Viola, Fukui Fine Arts Museum, Fukui, Japan, 1989; Slowly Turning Narrative, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, and the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; and Bill Viola: Unseen Images, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1992. Viola represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1995.