Licia He (Chinese, b. 1992) is a generative artist and human-computer interaction researcher who builds visual-generating systems rendered by robots.,Trained in studio art, computer science and information science, she creates generative plotter paintings: algorithms rendered physically by pen-plotting robots using watercolor, embroidery and ceramics. In her words, “algorithms are my love language, and the plotter is my quill”.
She holds a PhD in Information Science from the University of Michigan and a degree in Studio Art and Computer Science from Union College. After graduating, she spent a year researching natural color production worldwide as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. She later served as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University, where she founded the Generative Craft Lab. She began working in generative art around 2018, combining her interest in visual art and programming with robotics.
Running Moon launched in July 2022 as the first release of Art Blocks Curated Series 8, rendering the interaction between clouds and moonlight in forms inspired by stained glass and watercolor. She donated 25 percent of its primary sale proceeds to the AnitaB Institute and Girls Who Code.Her 2022 watercolor plotter painting Even when I want to, shown in Gazelli Art House's “GEN/GEN” exhibition, visualizes abstract waves through a Python-based algorithm and inspired her subsequent work Drifting Dreams.Drifting Dreams, released in 2023 through the London and New York exhibition “Companions of Code”, donated all of the artist's proceeds to organizations supporting female and non-binary technologists.That year she also released Fictional Lullaby through Feral File's “+GRAPH”, a group show curated by Casey Reas alongside artists including Joanie Lemercier and Julien Gachadoat.
In 2024 she took part in the panel “FEMG3N: Expanding the Art World with New Digital Practices” at the V&A's Digital Art Season, in conversation with Anna Ridler.That year she also introduced her recurring expansion algorithm, first explored in Running Moon and Sparkling Goodbye, to a wider audience through Painting With Plotters, a participatory design event at the V&A. For “Cure³”, a 2025 fundraising exhibition for Parkinson's research, she extended the algorithm into Expansion Explained, a collection of 120 plotter paintings rendered with brush and fountain pen ink on a pen-plotting robot.In 2026 she released DearPlotter Font Generator, an open-source program for generating pen-plotter fonts, produced in collaboration with the Processing Foundation and Tezos.
