Zach Lieberman

Zach Lieberman was born in 1977 and is based in New York City. He studied fine arts at Hunter College, focusing on painting and printmaking, before completing an MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design in 2002. During this period he discovered Macromedia Flash, an animation program that combined visual timelines with scripting, and through it recognized the expressive potential of software. He first worked in design studios on web and interactive projects before establishing himself as an artist and educator. He has held residencies at Ars Electronica Futurelab, Eyebeam, Dance Theater Workshop, and Hangar Barcelona. Beyond his practice he co-founded the open source C++ library openFrameworks, co-founded the School for Poetic Computation in New York in 2013, and is professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he directs the Future Sketches group. He also serves on the Creative Technologist Council of Baukunst, extending his work into design, education, and innovation.

Lieberman creates performances, installations, and drawings that use code to amplify human gesture, voice, and presence. He calls his approach poetic computation, treating code as a material that can be shaped with the precision of poetry. Since 2016 he has carried out a daily sketch practice, producing coded studies as a way to test visual ideas and sustain an ongoing process of discovery. His work is grounded in interactivity, creating feedback loops where participants become performers, from early projects such as EyeWriter, developed with collaborators to restore drawing ability to the paralyzed artist Tony Quan, and Manual Input Sessions with Golan Levin, which converted hand gestures into live audiovisual projection, to later series like Reflection Studies and Body Sketches, which probe how light, perception, and movement can be reimagined through code. In this practice he combines software with projection, sound, and custom drawing devices, extending generative processes into both digital and physical form. His projects often aim to make the invisible visible, transforming voices, movements, and gestures into forms that can be seen and experienced, and in recent years he has expanded this exploration through work with machine learning and augmented reality. His goal is to surprise, using computation to shift perception and reveal poetic possibilities in ordinary gestures.

Lieberman has exhibited internationally with work presented at Ars Electronica in Linz, the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In recent years his practice has been the subject of solo exhibitions at ARTECHOUSE in Washington, New York, and Miami, and he was included in the survey The Thinking Machine. Presenting Pioneers, 1953–2023 at Expanded Art in Berlin. He has been recognized with the Golden Nica in Interactive Art from Ars Electronica, Designs of the Year from the Design Museum London, the FutureEverything Prize, the Apple Design Award, and by Time Magazine’s Top 50 Inventions and Fast Company’s 100 Creative People in Business.