Claudia Hart (American, b. 1955) is a trans-media artist and a pioneer of virtual imaging, working across 3D animation, sculpture, painting, prints, installation, and augmented and virtual reality. Trained in art and architectural history at NYU and Columbia, she began exhibiting intermedia work in New York's downtown art scene in 1988 before moving her practice into computer space in the early 1990s.
Entering a field with almost no women three decades ago, Hart took a feminist position within simulation technologies, speaking in the voice of historical patriarchs and inverting the rationalist aesthetic language of the Western canon into fantastical, theatrical worlds. She traces her interest in illusion back to Dürer's perspective machines and Vermeer's camera obscura, a lineage she connected to 3D animation after seeing Toy Story at the 1995 Berlin Film Festival. As a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she developed Experimental 3D, the school's first program dedicated to teaching simulation technologies in an art school context, before retiring from teaching in 2023.
