Zach Lieberman (American, b. 1977) is a New York based artist, educator and programmer who turns human gesture, drawing and movement into interactive, code-based installations and performances.He studied under Golan Levin and formed the duo Tmema with him, creating audiovisual performances such as Messa di Voce, Scrapple and Drawn that use gesture, sound and mark-making to blur the line between the body and the machine.
Lieberman holds a BA in Fine Arts from Hunter College and an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design, and has taught as an adjunct associate professor at MIT's Media Lab.Seeing Jason Salavon's work and Yasunao Tone's glitch-music piece Solo for Wounded CD at the Whitney's 2001 exhibition BitStreams was formative for him as a student.He co-created openFrameworks, an open-source C++ toolkit for creative coding, and in 2013 co-founded the School for Poetic Computation, an alternative school for teaching the expressive potential of code.,With Theo Watson and Chris Sugrue, he built EyeWriter, an eye-tracking drawing system made with Graffiti Research Lab so a graffiti artist paralyzed by ALS could keep drawing using only his eyes.The project won the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica in 2010.,His work has also received Interactive Design of the Year from the Design Museum London and been shown at MoMA.
Lieberman has said he values generative art that makes a viewer feel something over work that impresses through technique, comparing his own practice to photographing math rather than illustrating a concept.,He is drawn to simple mathematical formulas that he can push toward the point of breaking, and often works within constraints such as short video formats and social media compression to sharpen rather than limit his ideas.
In 2022 Lieberman released horizon(te)s on fxhash, his first long-form generative work, made in collaboration with the artist Iskra Velitchkova, who paired her linework with his light and shader-based style.The following year Le Random commissioned six new pieces from him, including rotating cube study, point study and chrome waves, each exploring geometry, light and rhythm.In 2023 he also presented the solo show “Lichtrequisit: Studies in Color, Light, and Geometry” through Verse, comprising fifty editioned works.In 2025 his work appeared in the group exhibition “Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms” at the Toledo Museum of Art, alongside artists including Vera Molnár and Tyler Hobbs.
