On vacation in the mountains with his family, he nearly drowned in a lake, an experience he described as "… the most beautiful world I've ever seen in my life" and "without fear," and "peaceful.

"[7] He studied in Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts, including the Synapse experimental program, which evolved into CitrusTV.

[10] Viola was invited to show work at La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia) in 1977, by cultural arts director Kira Perov.

In 1997, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized and toured internationally a major 25-year retrospective of Viola's work.

This was a major collection of Viola's emotionally charged, slow-motion works inspired by traditions within Renaissance devotional painting.

Viola died from complications of Alzheimer's disease at home in Long Beach, California, on July 12, 2024, at the age of 73.

[17][4][18] Viola's art deals largely with the central themes of human consciousness and experience – birth, death, love, emotion, and a kind of humanist spirituality.

[19] Equally, the subject matter and manner of western medieval and renaissance devotional art informed his aesthetic.

For example, a lot of his work has themes such as life and death, light and dark, fire and water, stressed and calm, or loud and quiet.

Viola's work often exhibits a painterly quality, with his use of ultra-slow motion video encouraging the viewer to sink into the image and connect deeply to the meanings contained within it.

Writing at length about the necessity of poetic works responding to and taking advantage of contemporary computer technologies, Perloff sees Viola as an example of how new technology—in his case, the video camera—can create entirely new aesthetic criteria and possibilities that did not exist in previous incarnations of the genre — in this case, theater.

[24] While many video artists have been quick to adopt new technologies to their medium, Viola relied little on digital editing.

Perhaps the most technically challenging part of his work, and that which has benefited most from the advances since his earliest pieces, is his use of extreme slow motion.

The work references European Renaissance Old Masters such as Hieronymous Bosch and Dieric Bouts[28] In 2000, Viola collaborated with the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails and its lead singer Trent Reznor to create a video suite for the band's tour.

[29] In 2007, Viola was invited back to the 52nd Venice Biennale to present an installation called An Ocean Without a Shore, which was named after a quote from Ibn ʿArabī.

The Tristan project returned, both in music and video, to the Disney Hall in Los Angeles in April 2007, with further performances at New York City's Lincoln Center in May 2007 and at the Gergiev Festival in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in September 2007.

[37] In October 2009, Viola's solo exhibition entitled "Bodies of Light" appeared at the James Cohan Gallery in New York.

[38] In 2004, Viola began work on a new production of Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, a collaboration with director Peter Sellars, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, and executive producer Kira Perov.

The opera premiered at the Opéra National de Paris in 2005 and Viola's video work was subsequently shown as LOVE/DEATH The Tristan Project at the Haunch of Venison Gallery and St Olave's School, London, in 2006 and at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles in 2007.

This vast selection of paths presents many users with a unique viewing experience (in relation to that of the previous persons).

This connects to Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths"[42] where the participant has a variety of choices on how they see a story unfold before them.

[43] The award honors an individual "whose creative work has made a significant contribution to the development of cultural, scientific or human values anywhere in the world".