Edward  Zajec

Edward Zajec was born in 1938 in Trieste, Italy. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia, under Gabriel Stupica, and later earned an M.F.A. in painting and printmaking from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. In 1968, while teaching at Carleton College in Minnesota, he began exploring computers as a new medium to extend his artistic practice. After a brief stint teaching at St. Olaf College, he returned to Trieste in 1970, where he spent the next decade working at the University of Trieste’s Computer Center alongside Matjaz Hmeljak, developing early computer-generated graphics and animations. In 1980, Zajec founded the computer graphics lab and curriculum at Syracuse University’s Transmedia Center, where he taught Computer Graphics for the Fine Arts until he became professor emeritus in 2008.

Zajec’s work spans painting, printmaking, computer graphics, experimental animation, and interactive digital media. As a pioneer of computer art both in Italy and the US, his practice centers on modular repetition, geometric abstraction, and a fascinating interplay between chance and rule-based systems. Often programming in FORTRAN, he embraced a “visual dialogue” with the machine, sharing control with computational processes to reveal new possibilities of form and movement. His animations and interactive works highlight the temporal and color dynamics that pushed computer art beyond fixed images into evolving, time-based experiences.

His work has traveled the globe, showing at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Pompidou, Ars Electronica, and SIGGRAPH. His pieces are part of important collections like the Cleveland Museum of Art and featured in key exhibitions, including the landmark 50th May Show at Cleveland in 1968 and the influential SIGGRAPH Computer Culture Art Shows of the 1980s.