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.
In 2017 she presented The Flower Matrix, a virtual-reality installation commissioned by TRANSFER, that reimagined the labyrinth of the minotaur as a mixed-reality environment covered in flashing emojis representing money, power and addiction.In 2022, at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, she introduced Digital Combines, a hybrid genre pairing a physical painting with an NFT file, the two bound together and inseparable under instructions written into the token's metadata.In 2023 she released Systems Madness on Art Blocks Presents, a generative art collection made with the composer Andrew Blanton.
In 2025 the Francisco Carolinum in Linz, Austria mounted “Patterns and Politics”, her first comprehensive museum retrospective, surveying three decades of her digital worlds.In 2026 she received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, among other institutions.
