Copper Frances Giloth (American, b. 1952) is a new media artist working across computer animation, video, and plotter drawing since the late 1970s.,,In 1980 she became the first woman to earn an MFA from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she worked on the Zgrass raster graphics computer.,Her work returns to feminist themes, examining how women are represented in digital media.,
Her first computer work, Ballyoids Cardioids (1979), was made on the Zgrass-32 system. The following year she created Skippy Peanut Butter Jars, an autobiographical computer animation that aired on PBS and was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1982. Her 1981 animation As I Said combines Zgrass computer graphics and text to address the silencing of women's voices. It gave its title to “As I Said”, a 2025 solo exhibition of her early videos and plotter drawings at Microscope Gallery in New York.In 1994 she compiled Modeling the Female Body – A Survey of Computer Generated Women 1980-1993 from more than a decade of footage submitted to the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review, tracing recurring stereotypes in computer-generated depictions of women.
Giloth taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1985 to 2021, where she was Professor Emerita of Art and directed Academic Computing in the Office of Information Technologies.In 1982 she chaired the first ACM SIGGRAPH juried exhibition of experimental art and science, and in 1985 she and Jane Veeder co-authored "The Paint Problem," an essay on the future of artists' digital tools.She is featured in New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts (University of Illinois Press, 2018). In 2024 her work entered “Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.In 2025 historic works from her practice were shown in “FEMGEN” in Paris, an exhibition pairing pioneers from the Le Random collection, including Vera Molnar, with emerging artists.
