Camille Utterback

Associate Professor

BA Williams College

MPS Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), New York University

Camille Utterback's interactive installations, generative, site-specific, and reactive works engage participants in a dynamic process of kinesthetic discovery and play. Utterback's work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and gesture in visually layered ways. Her work aims to focus attention on the continued relevance and richness of the body in our increasingly mediated world.

To create her projects, Utterback combines various sensing and display technologies with the custom software she writes. Whether expressed in the form of architectural-scale projections, custom LED lighting, or intimate sculptures with embedded LCD screens, Utterback’s work engages participants in a process of embodied discovery as they explore the possibilities and behaviors of her physically engaged systems.

Utterback's extensive exhibit history includes more than fifty shows on four continents. Recent shows include Black Out - Silouhettes Then and Now at the National Portrait Gallery (2018), Watch This! at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2015), and a solo shows at the Stanford Art Gallery and Emerson College's Urban Arts’ Media Art Gallery in Boston, MA (2017). Utterback’s work is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco.

Utterback's work has been collected by The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, The Thoma Foundation, The La Caixa Foundation in Barcelona, Spain; Itaú Cultural Institute in São Paolo, Brazil; Henderson Development Corporation in Hong Kong, China; The Orange County Museum of Art in California; Hewlett Packard; The 21c Museum and Hotel, Louisville, KY; The Pittsburgh Children’s Museum;The Whitney Museum’s Artport website; and many private collectors.

Awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), an IBM Innovation Merit Award for her solo show Animated Gesturesin the Boston Cyberarts Festival (2007), a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award (2005), and a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002).

Utterback holds a U.S. patent (2004) for video tracking software she co-developed with collaborator Romy Achituv for their Text Rain installation.

Large scale commissions include works for The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (2016), The Liberty Mutual Group executive corridor in Boston, MA (2013), The FOR-SITE Foundation (2012), the City of Sacramento, California (2011), the City of San Jose, California (2010), and the City of St. Louis Park, Minnesota (2009).

Utterback has been an professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford since 2013. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science.