This article is about the life and work of video artist James Byrne.

Author Marita Sturken charts the trajectory of artist James Byrne's body of work. Byrne has worked with video since 1972, and his work has made the natural progression of the untrained artist learning a medium as they go.

Byrne developed a distinctive, body-based method of image making, in which he used the hand-held portable camera as a gestural extension of the body in a physical exchange with his subject. Byrne explored this aesthetic primarily in innovative video dance collaborations that were choreographed and performed specifically for video. Intense physicality, performance, and the human figure are central to these works.