Daria Tsoupikova is an Associate Professor in the School of Design and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Since 2002 her research and artwork focused on the development of virtual reality (VR) art projects and networked multi-user exhibitions for VR projection systems, such as the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE and CAVE2). Her work lies at the crossroads of artistic and technological innovation, and investigate computational creativity to design real life applications that advance healthcare, education and social change. For a decade, Daria has been collaborating with the with Hand Rehabilitation Laboratory in the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab (SRAL, former Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago) to develop a multi-user VR therapy to aid in hand rehabilitation for stroke survivors. She has been collaborating with mathematicians, educators and psychologists on the development of VR and serious games to advance k-12 mathematics education through the use of cryptography.

Her work has been exhibited and published by Springer, Leonardo, ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE VR, IEEE VIS, ISEA, SPIE and received several awards including Best Creative Work Award from the Electronic Literature Organization and Fulbright Scholar Award to work at ParisTech in France. Past projects have received federal funding from the NSF, National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) and the Department of Education.