Bio

Diane Willow is a multi-modal artist and creative catalyst. Working at the nexus of art and technology, science and architecture, she experiments with hybrid media to explore the poetic dynamics of nature, technology and community. Her public installations, interactive environments and evocative objects have been exhibited at the Subtle Technologies Festival and Pixel Gallery in Canada, the Beijing Film Academy, Joy Art, and the Celeste Art Center in China, the Okawa Center in Japan, on the east coast of the United States at the MIT Museum and the Danforth Museum, on the west coast at the Exploratorium, and in between at the Weisman Art Museum and the Northern Spark Festival in Minneapolis.

The catalyst for a a range of interdisciplinary and collaborative forms, she is the current instigator of the Studio Co-Laboratory, a faculty research collaborative of artists, architects, designers, scientists and engineers at the University of Minnesota. Previously she was the catalyst for the University of Minnesota symposium Wonder Women: Art & Technology 1968 - 2008 with public talks at the Walker Art Center and the companion exhibition, "culturing nature :: culturing technology" at the Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota. As co-convener of the MIT Media Lab and Haystack Mountain School collaboration, Digital Dialogues: Technology and the Hand she imagined the seeding of digital technologies in a range of material-based studios and gathered artists, researchers and other creative catalysts to participate in this experience, and contributed to a monograph reflecting upon this studio-based symposium. One of her most memorable adventures was co-curating the Arts Afloat exhibition of floating sculpture and installing it in Boston Harbor's Fort Point Channel with boat, barge, and crane.

Diane is the recipient of an invitational Osher Fellowship at the Exploratorium, a residential fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Minnesota, and an institute-wide appointment as Artist in Residence at MIT and Research Associate at MIT's Media Lab. She has been invited to speak about her work in diverse contexts including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, the College Art Association and the Tangible Embodied Interaction conference.

Diane has been a panelist for the National Endowment for Art and the National Science Foundation. She consults for museums nationally and is the former director of the Experimental Media Studio at the Boston Children's Museum where she led a series of exhibition projects supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the EPA, and the Boston Foundation. A graduate of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies Diane is currently Associate Professor of Experimental and Media Arts at the University of Minnesota.