Biographical Overview

Shawn Brixey (b. 1961) is the Floyd and Delores Jones Endowed Chair for the Arts, and is Co-Founder and the former Director of the University of Washington's research center and Ph.D. program in Digital Arts and Experimental Media. Previously, he was Chair and founder of the Digital Media Program at the University of California Berkeley, and was Director of their Center for Digital Art and New Media Research from 1998 to 2002. He served UC Berkeley as a Primary Investigator for the system wide UC Digital Arts Research Network, and as an Executive Council Member of the President's Planning Group on Digital Art. He served as an Executive Committee and Research Council Member for the system wide Digital Media Innovations Agency, and an Executive Committee Member of The Consortium for the Arts. He was also a founding member and Executive Committee Member of The College of Environmental Design's Center for Design Visualization, as well as the newly established Berkeley Institute for Design. He remains a Berkeley Art Museum Board of Trustees' Committee Member on New Media. In 2007 he was named to the Board of Directors of the Center for New Cinema (CNC) in Seattle, Washington. Anticipating and fostering the application of new technologies to experimental film making, CNC will project the future of cinema through groundbreaking film festivals, exhibitions, and commissions, premiering 2008.

From 1994 to 1998 he served as Professor of Cross-Disciplinary Arts at the University of Washington in Seattle where he chaired their Interdisciplinary Visual Arts Program. He was Acting Director of the Center for Advanced Research Technology in the Arts and Humanities in 1997, and was also Co-founder and Co-Director with David Salesin, and Richard Karpen of the University's of Washington's Laboratory for Animation Arts from 1996 to 1998. He was Visiting Professor and founder of New Media Program at The University of Kentucky from 1990 to 1994, and was the inaugural Leonardo Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan in 1989. He is a former fellow of MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

A graduate of MIT's Media Lab, he has exhibited art and technology works internationally; including Documenta in Kassel, Germany, The Deutscher Kunstlerbund in Karlsruhe, Germany, The Cranbrook Art Museum in Detroit, the MIT Museum in Boston, The Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati, The International Symposium of Electronic Arts at the Chicago Art Institute, the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, the first American Design and Architecture Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, Digital Secrets at Arizona State University's Institute for Studies in the Arts, the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, and at the Berkeley Art Museum. His research interests lie at the emerging interface of art, science and technology. He is currently writing a book with colleague James Coupe entitled, "From Simulation to Emulation: New Frontiers of Telematic Art in
the 21st Century". The book details a new field theory of telematic art based on radical new art forms, which successfully present important evolutionary transformations in digital media by synthesizing these technologies with the physical sciences and biotechnology as hybrid strategies for future computational expression.

He has received all levels of major grants and awards to support his research including: The Rockefeller Foundation, Apple Computer, AVID Incorporated, The Boxlight Corporation, The Intel Corporation, Silicon Graphics, Newport/Klinger Research Corporation, IBM GmbH, The National Institute of Health, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Leica and Hughes Aircraft.

In 1997 Brixey received the first Distinguished Scholar award from San Franciso State University's, New Media Institute. This award is presented to individuals whose work exemplifies significant innovation in the field of new media. In 1998 he was selected as a keynote speaker for The Mayor's International Multimedia Summit, San Francisco, California. In 2001 he received the first "Visual Arts" Hellman Award for Distinction in Research from the University of California, Berkeley, Office of the President and was invited as a Keynote Speaker for the Kansas City International Film Festival and the Prix Ars Judge for the "ArtFuture" Award sponsored by Acer Computer Corporation, Taipei, Taiwan. In 2003 he was honored with a prestigious Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for New Media, past fellows include Bill Viola, Lynn Hershman and Gary Hill. In 2004 Brixey along with
his DXARTS doctoral researchers Bret Battey and Ian Ingram were selected winners of the Editors Choice Award, in Popular Science Magazine's, "World Design Challenge". The winning entry was awarded for novel feed-forward ultrasound technology used to produce wide-field active noise cancellation in underwater environments developed specifically to protect endangered marine mammals. In 2006 Brixey was inducted as a lifetime fellow of the World Technology Network.

He lectures widely in the U.S. and Europe on new and emerging media art forms. In 2000 he co-chaired with Ken Goldberg, CRASH: The Berkeley International Symposium on Critical and Historical Issues in Net.Art, and was a selected speaker at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition "010101, Art in Technological Times". In 2001 He served as a panelist for the "New/Mediators" at the Berkeley Art Museum, sponsored by the New York/San Francisco based art association, GenArts. He was selected as an keynote speaker with Paul Kaiser in 2002, for NAMAC conference “Agents of Change”. Brixey was selected the 2005 Keynote Speaker, for Artmedia XI International, at the Universita Degli Studi di Salerno. The conference was sponsored by the Associazione di Matematica e Informatica Italiana, Associazione di Informatica Musicale Italiana, and the Association Francaise d'Informatique Musicale.

Critical writing and reviews of his work have been featured in diverse sources, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Cincinnati Inquirer, The Stranger, The Guardian, Wired Magazine, Surface Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Art News, WolkenKratzer Magazine (Germany), Smithsonian World Television, KQED, MSNBC, KQED, and NPR. Most recently, he appeared on the award winning documentary television series, "Secrets of the Sequence", by Cronkite-Ward which focuses on revolutionary models of research being undertaken around the Human Genome Project. He also appeared on the syndicated PBS program "Springboard", which featured interviews with eight leading media artists from the U.S. including Todd Machover from MIT and Jim Campbell from Faroudja Technology. He appears in multiple editions of "Who's Who", including Media, Entertainment, Communications, Who's Who in the West, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in Education, and Who's Who in the Millennium. Significant review of his work and teaching is included in Thames and Hudson's 1992 book release, Art of the Electronic Age, Leonardo/The Journal of Art, Science and Technology 2001, Information Arts, The Intersection of Art, Science and Technology by Dr. Stephen Wilson, 2002 from MIT Press, and the major new hardcover book, "From Technological to Virtual Art", by renowned historian Frank Popper, MIT Press, 2007

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