Rebecca Allen

Rebecca Allen. Photo via rebeccaallen.com.

American

1953

Rebecca Allen is an artist who made her first computer animation in 1974 and, at the New York Institute of Technology, made Swimmer (1981), an early animation of three-dimensional human motion. Her team made the computer graphics for Kraftwerk's 1986 video Musique Non Stop, and she was the founding chair of Design Media Arts at UCLA.

Full Bio

Rebecca Allen is an artist who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and made her first computer animation, Girl Lifts Skirt, in 1974. She received a master's degree from the Architecture Machine Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980 and later became the founding chair of the Department of Design Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.

As an artist and researcher at the Computer Graphics Laboratory of the New York Institute of Technology, she made Swimmer (1981), an early animation of three-dimensional human motion. Her computer-animated figure of Saint Catherine dances in Twyla Tharp's The Catherine Wheel, which the BBC first broadcast in 1983.

In 1984 Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk contacted Allen, and over nearly two years her team at NYIT made the computer graphics for the band's 1986 video Musique Non Stop, with three-dimensional heads of the band members. The chanting female voice on the track is hers, and her white wireframe heads appear front and back on the sleeve of the American 12-inch single.