Anne Morgan Spalter

Anne Morgan Spalter, born in 1965, is an American visual artist, educator, author, and collector. She studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) before transferring to Brown University, where she earned degrees in Visual Art and Mathematics and developed an interdisciplinary multimedia practice. After working for several years in investment banking in New York, she became increasingly interested in digital imaging software and the creative possibilities of the computer. Realizing she wanted to dedicate herself fully to art, she left finance and returned to RISD to complete an MFA in Painting. In the 1990s, Spalter founded the first digital fine arts courses at RISD and Brown University. She later worked as an Artist in Residence and Visual Computing Researcher in Brown’s Computer Science Department, co-authored research on digital visual literacy, and published The Computer in the Visual Arts (1999), a foundational text in digital art education. Alongside her husband Michael Spalter, she also helped build one of the world’s leading private collections of early computer art through Spalter Digital.

Drawing from science fiction, surrealism, mathematics, Jungian psychology, sacred geometry, and the collective unconscious, Spalter creates dreamlike environments featuring cosmic forms, kaleidoscopic patterns, mythic animals, deserts, lightning, spaceships, and shifting architectural imagery. Her practice includes painting, drawing, printmaking, animation, video, AI generated imagery, and digital media, often centered on what she describes as the modern landscape. Many works begin with photographs and videos she captures from helicopters, airplanes, trains, highways, and urban environments, which she later transforms through digital editing, custom software, AI systems, and traditional mark making. Interested in perception, symbolism, and pattern, Spalter often explores how digital technologies can reveal unexpected visual relationships and emotional atmospheres within everyday environments. Her work reflects longstanding interests in cosmology, quantum physics, spirituality, abstraction, and the tension between natural and technological worlds.

Spalter’s art is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and has been exhibited internationally at venues including MASS MoCA, SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York City, Expanded Art in Berlin, and Colville Place Gallery in London. Her work was included in the SIGGRAPH 1992 Art Show, one of the early major international exhibitions dedicated to digital art. She later participated in the SIGGRAPH 2004 Education Forum as a panelist and presenter, served on the review committee for the SIGGRAPH 2006 Art Show, and was a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art Committee. Spalter has lectured widely on digital art and its history at institutions including Christie’s, the Smithsonian Institution, RISD, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.