Ira Greenberg is an American artist and computer scientist whose work moves between painting, drawing and computational processes. He writes code that generates images and, in a parallel practice, draws by hand in ways that mimic the pattern-searching of an algorithm, treating computation and drawing as two sides of the same process.
Greenberg holds a B.F.A. from Cornell University and an M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and began his career as a painter before moving into computer graphics for practical reasons. He worked as a managing and creative director at H2O Associates, building a new media division in New York's Silicon Alley during the original dot-com boom and bust. In 2007 he wrote “Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art”, the first major language reference on the Processing programming language, followed by two further creative coding texts. Greenberg directs the Center of Creative Computation and is a professor at Southern Methodist University, with a joint appointment in the Meadows School of the Arts and the Lyle School of Engineering, and leads the university's study-abroad program in Tokyo.
