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American

1952

Copper Frances Giloth was the first woman to earn an MFA from the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois Chicago and helped organize the first ACM SIGGRAPH juried exhibitions of experimental art and science. A pioneering new media artist and educator, her work spans digital art, animation, and immersive environments, and she continues to shape the field through her influential practice and teaching.

Copper Frances. Photo courtesy the artist.

Full Bio

Copper Frances Giloth is an award-winning new media artist and educator based in Amherst,

Massachusetts, and Aix-en-Provence, France. She works across digital media, virtual environments, animations, video, drawing, and installations. Giloth’s artistic practice is shaped by the intersection of her daily life with a pioneering approach to using computers as her primary medium.

Giloth was the first woman to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1980. Early in her career, she

helped organize the first ACM SIGGRAPH juried exhibitions of experimental art and science, making significant contributions to the development of digital art.

Giloth is featured in the book New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts (University of Illinois Press, 2018), which highlights trailblazing women who helped establish the Midwest as a global center for the digital and artistic revolution that began in the 1980s. In 2024,

her work and writing were included in Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2025, she had a solo exhibition at

Microscope Gallery in New York City.

Her work has been widely exhibited in prominent venues including the Museum of Modern Art in

New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the National Academy of Sciences in

Washington, D.C., and ACM SIGGRAPH festivals. She has also exhibited internationally in

Europe, Japan, and Australia.

Giloth is an Emerita Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she

taught from 1985 to 2021. She also served as the Director of Academic Computing in the university’s Office of Information Technologies. Additionally, she was a Visiting Instructor at

Princeton University and the University of Michigan, and taught at the School of the Art Institute of

Chicago.

Her honors include the ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award (2000) and recognition at

film and video festivals such as the Atlanta Film and Video Festival and the Chicago

International Film Festival. Giloth remains an influential figure in new media art and digital visualization.