How does the brain mediate our subjective experience of the external world? What neural mechanisms might be responsible for our conscious experience of basic visual features or our ability to recognize and classify complex objects? In this talk, I will describe research from my lab showing that fMRI activity in early visual areas, including primary visual cortex, is tightly linked to visual awareness of basic features across variety of conditions. These include spontaneous perceptual alternations during binocular rivalry, perceptual filling-in of phantom visual gratings, and visual imagery in the absence of physical input. In contrast, activity in high-level category-selective areas, such as the Fusiform Face Area, is tightly linked to the conscious recognition of relevant visual objects and the formation of perceptual decisions. These results support the notion that the conscious representation of features and objects involve different levels of neural representation in the human visual system.