Bio + view, download, or print current bio After graduating from New York University with a BA cum laude in art history in 1978, Claudia Hart studied architecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture and received a MS in1984. She then practiced as an art and architecture critic. In 1985-86, she was Associate Editor of ID (then Industrial Design Magazine) where, along with Senior Editor Steven Skov Holt, she redeveloped it into its present form, ID: the Magazine of International Design. Hart has published her critical writings widely, and then went to Artforum magazine where she served as Reviews Editor until 1988. She continues to write critically but in the academic context, presenting papers at the past three College Art Association conferences with a new paper, “Baby doll: Boys and Their Virtual Toys,” scheduled for the National Womens Studies conference in Denver this November. She continues to publish theoretical papers in academic journals such as Media-N, the New Media Caucus journal, Bad Papers and Byte Shark. In 1988, Hart showed multi media work with the Pat Hearn Gallery in New York, moving from critical to artistic practice. At that time, she exhibited paintings and installations inspired by the visionary architecture from the French Enlightenment. After receiving an NEA Fellowship in 1989, she shifted her practice to Europe where she spent ten years and received numerous fellowships, including the Kunstfond Bonn, Stiftung Kulturfonds, the Stiftung Luftbrueckendank Grant, the Arts International Foundation Grant, the Kunstlerhaus Bethanian grant and two fellowships from the American Center in Paris. In Europe she exhibited widely with galleries and museums. Her work from this time has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Metropolitan Museum, NY; The MIT List Center, Cambridge; The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New School, New York; The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin; and the Sammlung Goetz Museum, Munich. Hart returned to New York in 1998 to publish two illustrated books, originally catalogs for her exhibitions. She wrote, illustrated and designed A Child's Machiavelli, published by Abbeville, Penguin and Nautilus, and Dr. Faustie's Guide to Real Estate Development, published by Nautilus. Hart then studied animation at NYU's Center for Advanced Digital Applications with the intention of animating her illustrated books. Instead she developed a body of work consisting of 3D-animated installations that she thinks of as hybrids between structuralist films and temporal paintings. Her contemporary art consists of designs for sublime landscape gardens often containing expressive and sensual female bodies meant to interject emotional subjectivity into what is typically the overly-determined Cartesian world of digital design. Her work has been seen at various public institutions including PS 1 and PS 122, biennial Zero1 in San Jose. and had the first one-woman show presented at the Wood Street new media galleries in Pittsburgh. Hart is currently an Assistant Professor in the department of Film, Video, New Media and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by bitforms gallery, NY. Her new works are part of The Sandor Family Collection, Chicago, the Leutz Teutloff Collection, Cologne, and the Borosan Collection, Istanbul, among others. Presently, Hart is a fellow of the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Media and Arts, at Columbia College, Chicago. The Belic Institute has funded Recumulation, an animation inspired by a seminal dance film by Tricia Brown, using a motion captured performance by artist Roberto Sifuentes. This work premieres in Chicago in the spring and in New York, at the Black and White Project Space in Williamsburgh, as a monumental installation including site-specific architectural performance, November 2011.              + view high res image