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.
