The "phosphorescent environment" that so impressed Ancona was the Northwest's iridescent light shown for the first time as art turned video. As a video artist, Chase lectured and showed her work abroad under the auspices of the United States Information Agency, for which she traveled to India, Europe, Australia, South America, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Working with light as her medium, with dancers turned into flowing colored shapes, Chase brought the Northwest sensibility to video. Her particular favorite was a pale blue, similar to the color of the sky in a summer sunset. Highly sensual, her work is fluid and stable while exploring movement in the context of abstract architecture. Chase formed a romantic and professional relationship with composer George Kleinsinger, and he composed the music for 12 of her videos. In the 1980s, Chase used video to explore other concerns such as a divided mind using a split image, multiple superimpositions suggesting compromises, the drift mode suggesting insecurity. In "Glass Curtain" (1983), actress Jennie Ventriss anguished over her mother's mental and physical deterioration from Alzheimer's disease. Chase's most widely shown work is a series of 30-minute video dramas regarding older women's autonomy, titled "By Herself". "Table for One" (1985), stars Geraldine Page in a voice-over monologue of a woman uneasy about dining alone, followed by "Dear Papa" (1986), starring Anne Jackson and her daughter Roberta Wallach. The third video was "A Dancer" (1987). "Still Frame" (1988) featured Priscilla Pointer and Robert Symonds. "Sophie" (1989) featured Joan Plowright as a woman who has just left her philandering husband to become "Sophie, reader of French tarot cards". The first two videos were presented at the Berlin and London Film Festivals in 1985 and 1986. "Dear Papa" won First Prize at Paris' 1986 "Women's International Film Festival". Parke Godwin's novel "A Truce with Time" (1988, Bantam Books) is a fictionalized version of Chase's life during her New York years. While he was writing it, Chase made her own film about their relationship, "Still Frame", produced at the American Film Institute. Art historian Patricia Failing also wrote a book about Chase, "Doris Chase, Artist in Motion: From Painting and Sculpture to Video Art" (1991, University of Washington Press).