Past Board Members
We would like to thank all the previous governing board members who have made Leonardo what it is today.
Past Board Members
Darlene Tong
Roger Malina
Tami Spector
Greg Harper
Martin Anderson
Jeffrey Babcock
Mark Beam
Mina Bissell
Rosa Casarez-Levison
Jim Crutchfield
Ann Dabovich
Theodosia Ferguson
Penny Finnie
Rich Gold
Michael Joaquin Grey
John Hearst
Melinda Klayman
Larry Larson
Lynn Hershman-Leeson
Curtis Karnow
Melinda Klayman
Marjorie Duckworth Malina
Christine Maxwell
Samuel Okoshken
Greg Niemeyer
Ed Payne
Anne Brooks Pfister
Sonya Rapoport
Beverly Reiser
Mark Resch
Marci Reichelstein
Lord Eric Roll
Piero Scaruffi
Cynthia Selin
Christian Simm
JD Talasek
Marcia Tanner
Meredith Tromble
Aimee Tsao
Makepeace Tsao
John Weber
Ruth West
Barbara Lee Williams
Richard Wilson
Stephen Wilson
In Memoriam
Sonya Rapoport
Sonya Rapoport was widely recognized as a pioneering digital artist whose 65-year career bridges the gap between painting and interactive conceptual art. Her prolific interdisciplinary art practice combined her extensive research in the sciences and humanities with highly personal subject matter. Rapoport received a BA in Labor Economics from New York University in 1946 and an MA in Art from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1949. Her early career as a painter of figurative and abstract-expressionist work culminated in a prestigious solo exhibition at the Legion of Honor in 1963. In 1976 she began creating drawings on computer printouts, eventually leading to her reinvention as a digital artist. She became an integral part of a small community of artists experimenting with early computer technology, often creating interactive installations that involved the gathering, processing and representing of data by computer output. Her work was presented in over 50 national and international solo and retrospective exhibitions during her career. Her work has been discussed in several Leonardo journal articles and books, as well as in numerous other publications. In 2012, Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport, edited by Terri Cohn, was published by Heyday. In 2014, the Bancroft Library of Western Americana at UC Berkeley acquired the archives of her life’s work. The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust was founded in 2015 to preserve her art and promote appreciation of her work. Sonya passed away in June 2015.
In Memoriam
Stephen Wilson
Stephen Wilson was a San Francisco author, artist and professor who explored the cultural implications of emerging technologies such as biosensors, gps, and artificial intelligence. His award-winning interactive installations and performances have been shown internationally in galleries and SIGGRAPH, CHI, NCGA, Ars Electronica and V2 art shows. He was an investigator in NSF projects and artist in residence at various think tanks including Xerox PARC. He published numerous articles and books, including Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology (MIT Press/Leonardo Books, 2001). He directed the Conceptual/Information Arts Program at San Francisco State University, which prepares artists to work at the frontiers of research. Stephen passed away in January 2011. Visit his website at http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~swilson/.
In Memoriam
Marjorie Duckworth Malina
Marjorie Duckworth Malina was born on 28 April 1918 in Elslack, Yorkshire, England. The daughter of John James Duckworth and Mary Anne Bolton, she was the youngest of four; her sisters were Thyra, Annie and Mary. She attended the University of London, obtaining a bachelor's degree in 1939. She trained in accountancy while working in her father's textile company, JJ Duckworth Ltd. During World War II she served in the Women's Auxiliary Corps, reaching the rank of captain, and with the antiaircraft batteries operated by women that helped defend Britain during the war. Shortly after the war she applied to work at UNESCO, a newly founded organization, after hearing a radio broadcast by Julian Huxley, and was hired in the personnel department in 1947. There she met Frank Malina, then Deputy Director for Science of UNESCO, and they married in 1949. Frank and Marjorie bought a house in Boulogne Bellancourt and raised two sons, Roger and Alan. The Malina home was the birthplace of the journal Leonardo and a center of art-science debate in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s. It was also the studio where Frank Malina worked as a pioneer in the kinetic art movement. The steady flow of guests and visitors included astronautical pioneers, artists and scholars, including Jacob Bronowski, Frank Popper, Academician Sedov, Roy Ascott and Leonardo editorial board members. Numerous friends and colleagues enjoyed the hospitality of Marjorie Duckworth Malina. She worked tirelessly for the success of the Leonardo project and was an ardent defender of the ideals of international collaboration. Marjorie passed away in the spring of 2006. Donations to Leonardo/ISAST in memory of Marjorie Malina are gratefully accepted.
In Memoriam
Barbara Lee Williams
Barbara Lee Williams was a San Francisco Bay Area art critic and essayist specializing in 20th-century artists and ethics. A former curator and educator, she wrote regularly for San Francisco Sidewalk, Microsoft's Bay Area entertainment guide; her work has also appeared in The Threepenny Review, San Francisco Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor and literary publications. She served on the Board of Directors of Leonardo/ISAST since 1997 and was the Vice-Chairman of the Board and head of the Leonardo Awards Program Committee. She also contributed dialogues on electronic arts to Leonardo Digital Reviews. Williams passed away in March 2002.
In Memoriam
Rich Gold
Rich Gold was a composer, cartoonist and researcher who in the 1970s co-founded the League of Automatic Music Composers, the first network computer band. As an internationally known artist he invented the field of Algorithmic Symbolism, an example of which, "The Party Planner," was featured in Scientific American. He was head of the sound and music department of Sega USA's coin-op video game division and the inventor of the award winning "Little Computer People" (Activision), the first fully autonomous computerized person one could buy. For 5 years he headed the electronic and computer toy research group at Mattel Toys and was the manager of the Mattel PowerGlove, among other interactive toys. He also worked on Captain Power, the first interactive broadcast TV show and ICVD, an early CD-based video system. After working as a consultant in Virtual Reality he joined Xerox PARC, where he was a researcher in Ubiquitous Computing, the study of invisible, embedded and tacit computation. He was a co-designer of the PARC Tab, helped launch the successful LiveBoard project, and was the inventor or co-inventor on 10 patents. In 1992 he created and ran for ten years the PARC artist-in-residence program (PAIR), which pairs fine artists and scientists together based on shared technologies (Art and Innovation, MIT Press, describes the project). He was the manager of a multi-disciplinary laboratory, RED (Research in Experimental Documents), which looks at the creation of new document genres by merging art, design, science and engineering. His particular area of study was in corporate identity within new genres and "living documents" (ever changing documents deeply embedded in ever changing cultures). Gold was a Fellow at The World Economic Forum and as an Applied Cartoonist gave talks all over the world on his work, the pragmatics of knowledge art and on contemporary innovation. His passion was the merging of art, science, design and engineering. Gold passed away in January 2003.