jonCates is an artist, teacher and curator working in glitch art, video and performance, treating the failures and imperfections of digital technology as material rather than as defects to be fixed. For decades based in Chicago, where he taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he founded the international Gli.tc/h festivals and shaped an aesthetic he calls “dirty new media”.
He earned a BFA in Studio Art with Honors from Illinois State University in 1997 and an MA in Media Art Histories from the Donau-Universität Krems in Austria in 2009. jonCates began teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999, becoming its first full-time tenured New Media faculty member and developing its New Media Art curriculum, later ranked “Best New Media Program” in “Best Fine Arts Schools” by U.S. News and World Report. He later chaired the school's Film, Video, New Media and Animation department and its Faculty Senate.
