George Legrady
Prof. at UC Santa Barbara
George Legrady is an internationally exhibited and published artist, author and scholar, whose practice and research have addressed, since the mid-1980s, the impact of computer processes for fine arts practice, and social transformation. He is a pioneer in the integration of computation with fine arts photographic practice. His research, teaching, writing and artistic projects contribute to the ongoing historical and contemporary developments of how technologies transform visual content to result in new kind of representations through the intersections of computation, data, photographic visualizations resulting in works-on-paper, multi-image lenticular panels, time-based animations, and digital interactive data-based installations.
His artworks are in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Centre Pompidou Museum, Paris, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the musée d’art contemporain in Montreal, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Philbrook Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, 21c Museum and others. Legrady has realized a number of permanent public commissions that include the Santa Monica/Vermont Los Angeles Metro Rail (2007), the Corporate Executive Board (Arlington) (2009), and the Seattle Central Library (2005-present), a data visualization installation that may be the longest running continuous such project to-date. His first major project was a photographic documentary of the everyday life of the James Bay Cree.
In the academic world, George Legrady is distinguished professor of Digital Media and directs the Experimental Visualization Lab. He is former chair of the Media Arts & Technology (2013-2017) graduate program at UC Santa Barbara. He recently held a Visiting Professional Fellowship at the Centre for Interactive Cinema at the University of New South Wales, and also a Visiting Scholar position in the Diaspora Lab at the Institut des Mines-Télécom, Paristech. Previous to UCSB, he directed the digital media graduate program at the Merz Akademie for Visual Communication in Stuttgart, co-directed the Information Arts/Conceptual Design program at the San Francisco State University, photography faculty in the Visual Arts dept. at the University of Southern California, visiting faculty at the California Institute for the Arts, and faculty in photography at the University of Western Ontario.
His work has been supported by the Creative-Capital Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Daniel Langlois Foundation for the Arts, Science and Technology, the Canada Council for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Graham Foundation Advanced Studies in Fine Arts.