Opening our eyes on waking from a dreamless sleep, the immediacy and directness of conscious experience belies the complexity of the underlying neural mechanisms, which remain incompletely understood. My talk will both review recent empirical studies of neural correlates of visual awareness in humans, and reflect on the relationship of this work to preceding plenary talks and symposia in ASSC-8. I will review experimental findings that complement previous behavioral, neuropsychological and electrophysiological work by suggesting that activity in functionally specialized areas of ventral visual cortex is necessary for visual awareness. However, more recent studies suggest that activity in ventral occipital and temporal cortex is not sufficient to support conscious vision without a contribution from parietal and prefrontal areas. Such a contribution may reflect processes such as selective attention and working memory. Reciprocal interactions between parietal and ventral visual cortex may thus serve to selectively integrate internal representations of visual events in the broader behavioral context in which they occur. Such network interactions may account for the richness of our experience, and provide a fundamental neural substrate for conscious visual awareness.