Joan Truckenbrod

Joan Truckenbrod, born in 1945 in Greensboro, North Carolina, is a pioneering digital artist who lives and works in Chicago. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979 and has been a professor there for over two decades, including serving as Chair of the Art and Technology and Time Arts Departments. Early in her career, she developed and taught some of the first computer art courses, including Creative Computer Imaging, helping to establish digital art education as a formal discipline. Beginning her work with FORTRAN programming in the early 1970s, Truckenbrod is among the first artists to explore computer-generated art.

Her work explores the intersection of ritual, nature, and technology, using custom algorithms to translate intangible natural phenomena into physical form. Through drawing, fiber, video, and installation, she visualizes experiences like firelight, ocean tides, and ancestral memory. Truckenbrod often combines video projection with handmade, sculptural elements to create immersive installations that open portals between physical and spiritual realms. These works reveal the presence of multiple realities simultaneously experienced in both indigenous rituals and contemporary electronic culture, offering a layered and nuanced exploration of perception and existence.

Truckenbrod’s artwork has been exhibited internationally with solo shows in cities including Paris, London, Berlin, and Chicago. Her work has appeared in major exhibitions at LACMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the IBM Gallery, and Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro.  Recently her artwork was included in an exhibition at Kunsthalle, Wien in Vienna, where it traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Luxembourg.  One of her programmed plotter drawings is currently in an exhibition at Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris.  She is the author of Creative Computer Imaging and The Paradoxical Object: Video Film Sculpture, and her work is featured in numerous key publications on digital and fiber art. Recognized with a Fulbright Fellowship, Scandinavian-American Foundation Fellowship, multiple Illinois Arts Council grants, and grants from the Oregon Arts Commission.  Her work is held in public and private collections worldwide, including the Whitney, the Art institute of Chicago, AKG Buffalo Art Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her artwork is represented by RCM Galerie in Paris.